FAQ: Online Reputation Management for Healthcare

More than ever, consumers are turning to the internet for information about your healthcare organization. Online, patients are reading – and leaving – reviews on everything from your facilities to your providers.

Approximately 90% of patients read online reviews to evaluate providers, and 69% of patients will not even consider a healthcare provider with less than a 4.0 average star rating. The message for marketers is clear: after all the time you've spent optimizing every channel in the patient journey, you simply can't afford to neglect your reviews.

Drawing on 20 years of experience helping healthcare organizations navigate an increasingly digital world, we're sharing everything we know about the basics of online reputation management for healthcare. This is the third installment of a five-part series – including four blogs and an actionable checklist for healthcare marketers – on using reviews to boost your digital presence, improve discoverability, and build trust in your brand.

So far, we've explored the benefits of healthcare reputation management and how to create a reputation management strategy. You have the basics down, so let's move on to specifics. How often should you respond to reviews? What team is responsible? Can you even reply to reviews without violating HIPAA? Let's dive in.

Just catching up? Read the previous blogs:

• The Benefits of Healthcare Reputation Management

• How to Create a Healthcare Reputation Management Strategy

Coming up next:

• How to Measure Online Reputation Management Success in Healthcare

• [Checklist] How to Use Yext Reviews for Healthcare Reputation Management

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Even as you start to understand the role reviews play in your patients' digital journeys, you might still have questions. (Most of us do!)

Here, we'll answer some of the most frequently asked questions about online reputation management for healthcare, like:

• How often should we respond to reviews?

• Which reviews should I respond to?

• Which reviews are more important: negative or positive?

• How do we manage and respond to reviews from so many different review platforms?

• Is the healthcare marketing team responsible for replying to reviews? Can healthcare providers respond to reviews?

• How should our organization respond to reviews?

• How do we respond to negative patient reviews?

• Where should we start with our review response strategy?

• How do we ask for new reviews?

• Is it better to send an email or an SMS text message to a patient?

• I can't generate new reviews for all my providers. Which ones do I prioritize?

• How often should I send a review request?

• How do I avoid "survey fatigue"?

• Should I prioritize first- or third-party reviews?

• Should I put my first party reviews on Google or on other healthcare websites?

• How do I track the value of a review generation program?

Ideally, you should respond to reviews as quickly as possible – or at least within a few days of receipt. More than half of consumers expect you to respond to their reviews, so it's best not to wait too long. Setting time aside on a regular cadence (i.e., once a week, or biweekly) to respond to reviews helps you stay on schedule and accountable.

In an ideal world with unlimited resources, you would want to respond to all reviews — so that you can take advantage of the interaction benefit that promotes SEO improvements in your listings. Whether positive or negative, responding to reviews tells search engines – including Google – that you are actively managing your online presence.

Unfortunately, that's not practical — or even possible — in today's day and age. (Have you taken a look at review volume lately? A quick, simple patient search for "best GP near me" can turn up thousands of providers, with tens of thousands of reviews spread across them — and that's just one specialty in one geographic area.)

Some organizations respond to every review except 5 star reviews. The logic here is that people who have provided a five star rating are already happy.

Other organizations decide not to respond to positive reviews and to only respond to reviews under 3 stars. Doing so provides a benefit to review interaction on listings and also showcases to others searching that your organization takes moderate to negative reviews seriously.

Depending on the volume of reviews your organization gets and the staffing challenges on your team, you will need to make the decision that is best for your organization. At the very least, we recommend responding to moderate to negative reviews.

If you have limited resources, prioritize replying to your negative reviews (like 1- and 2-star reviews) first and foremost. Once you've replied to all your negative reviews, monitor and respond to new reviews – including positive reviews, if you can – on a regular basis. This helps improve your online reputation, and helps potential patients understand that you take their feedback seriously.

We recommend that your reviews are managed and responded to (promptly) from one place and one team. When one stakeholder or team is responsible for responding to reviews, it's less likely that one will slip through the cracks.

If your marketing team member(s) own(s) listings and your website, they should also own your review response. Reviews are part of the external facing view of your healthcare organization and are part of the overall management of the digital patient journey (and your brand's online reputation).

The more people you incorporate into your review response responsibilities, the more you set yourself up for missing review responses, less than timely responses, and challenges with individuals following your legal or compliance team's instructions. Consult with your legal or compliance team on the best path forward to make sure messaging is centralized, and keep your providers informed.

While we cannot advise you on what to say in your responses, we do recommend you consult with your legal counsel or compliance team on the appropriate response to include in your guidelines for your organization. This helps review responses so that you are replying with HIPAA compliant review responses. Because responding to reviews can be tedious, we recommend you use templates based on certain review types.

First, respond to the review with the appropriate language so that the individual who left the review can follow up with your organization. Then, just as you might share a positive review with a provider or facility, you will want to notify your stakeholders of negative reviews.

If you receive a negative review, send the review and a notification to the respective stakeholder to perform service recovery and/or flag the review to Patient Experience or the respective service line or department. Next, respond to the negative review with your approved review response language.

Ultimately, you want the negative review to receive compassionate attention. Then, you'll want to take the appropriate service recovery steps to improve future patients' experience. Remember, a negative review is a gift: someone gave you the information you need in order to make adjustments and deliver a better experience in the future.

If you have limited resources, a good rule of thumb to follow in responding to reviews is to prioritize your negative reviews and begin a response strategy from there. An easy way of thinking about this is to make sure to respond to all 1- and 2-star reviews.

Once you've gained control of your negative reviews, you can move into responding to 3-star reviews. Take stock of how much time it is taking you to respond to these reviews and allocate your team's resources accordingly.

You have a few options to set up review generation:

1. Manually upload patient email or mobile numbers into your review platform

2. Connect your Electronic Medical Record (EMR) to a review platform via an API

3. Share QR codes for in-person visits

You can use any of these strategies. Typically, an organization does not get started with review generation with a full program. Many organizations "test" review generation success with a subset of providers or departments and expand their efforts from there. It's faster to get started with a regular upload of data than it is to wait for an IT team or an external organization to build an API.

However, automation is the ultimate goal. If you are manually uploading patient data into your review management platform, you should work on building the API from your EMR to your review generation platform at the same time. Some organizations are able to set this up within days, while others take a few months to set up. Timing depends on your IT team and/or your external third-party organization's support of the API build.

Finally, if you don't want to upload any patient information into a platform, or if you want to complement your strategy to ensure you are reaching every possible patient, you can always use QR codes for in-person visits and ask patients to scan it (which will have a specific URL associated with a specific provider). They can easily leave a review that way.

Ultimately, it's your choice. You can opt to do SMS or text surveys, or send email surveys at scale. Some organizations may even opt to do both.

Consider that 82% of consumers keep SMS notifications switched on, and the click through rate of SMS texts is approximately 36% on average – whereas it's only 3.4% for emails and around 2% for social media. Text messages also have a 45% response rate, whereas email responses are just at 8%.

One of the main reasons you want to generate reviews is to improve your star ratings, which in turn, allow you to improve your SEO ranking on a listing. If you cannot generate reviews for every provider in your organization, we recommend a few strategies to get started. Prioritize:

1. Those with the lowest star ratings. Start generating reviews for those listings with the most negative sentiment and/or the lowest star ratings. By simply asking people to leave a review, you will naturally boost the total number of reviews and star ratings delivered, and you will likely receive a bump in star ratings. This is your opportunity to turn around negative star ratings.

2. Those with a low review count. Improving your SEO rankings for a provider should be a priority, and one way to improve your ranking is to increase the number of reviews per listing. Take stock of where you are lacking reviews and begin there.

3. Those that are the highest-value and/or greatest revenue drivers. If you have a strategic focus area for your health system (e.g. primary care, or women and baby, or OBGYN), start with those providers. It's fair to assume that people who are looking to make a commitment to a health system for a series of appointments (e.g. women and baby, where you get pre-natal, natal, post-natal, and pediatric care) will likely conduct more research — meaning reviews could have a bigger impact on their decision-making processes.

We've seen organizations toy with many different timeframes to send their review requests. Survey requests can go out as soon as immediately, or you could wait until after six weeks. However, we recommend that you consider the timeframe of when you are sending your first-party review requests and time your third-party review requests accordingly. More on this below.

In our research, we have not seen any evidence that survey response rates have declined for either first-party or third-party review requests when a dual strategy approach is taken. In fact, we've heard from organizations working with Yext that they're seeing robust response rates on both, and some organizations are actually seeing higher response rates when both are employed.

We hear this question about "review fatigue" or "survey fatigue" quite often. Organizations may already send Press Ganey or Qualtrics or NRC reviews, and they don't want third-party review requests to interfere with first-party surveys. It's a very legitimate question and one that many organizations have challenges understanding.

We recommend that you take the following approach:

• Prioritize your first-party surveys and the timeframe in which you are sending those surveys.

• Follow up your review requests for third-party reviews after your first-party requests. For example, if you send a first party (e.g., Press Ganey) survey within 24 hours of a patient visit, aim to send your third party review request 48-72 hours following the visit. That way, you will give enough time for a patient to respond to your Press Ganey survey while also responding to your third-party request — before the patient has time to forget about the interaction with your organization.

You could also consider third-party review requests for certain service line providers, for example, or only send third-party requests for primary care (but not for any inpatient experiences). First-party surveys will almost certainly be sent for in-patient treatment, so you can parallel-path your generation strategy by avoiding all inpatient review requests for third parties (if you want).

There are a lot of different ways to think about this, but rest assured that organizations are not seeing survey fatigue when patients receive both requests.

While patients are searching online for healthcare information, we do know that Google tends to be the place they start their journey. You want to make sure to generate reviews on as many sites as you can, but if you have to start with one site before tackling the rest, we recommend starting with Google.

Remember, Google is not the be-all and end-all of all reviews, and you do need to ensure other sites get recent reviews and improved stars — but Google is important, and it's necessary to at least begin with that site.

Press Ganey, NRC, Qualtrics, and Medallia reviews are what we call "first-party" reviews and are usually managed via your Patient Experience team. They are not the same as Google reviews, and reviews on WebMD, Facebook, review sites, etc. (or what we call "third-party" reviews).

First-party reviews are really valuable for patient experience insights, service recovery, and CMS reimbursements. When aggregated, they are also excellent for sharing on individual provider and facility pages on your website.

It's important to add your first-party reviews to your provider and facility pages. This strategy can help your individual provider pages rank higher in search engine results. Also, it helps Google read your site, extract the provider's star ratings, and add those visuals to the organic search results for that provider (like the provider's listing). This gives you the opportunity to attract more organic traffic to your site – rather than sending patients to another third-party webpage you don't own.

The moment you start to add these same first-party reviews to other healthcare websites, you begin to dilute traffic to your own site. You don't want to send interested patients to third-party sites because you won't be able to control the flow of traffic. Also, your marketing team won't be able to control and gain insights on the digital patient journey. Instead, maximize the benefits of reputation management by publishing first-party reviews on your individual provider pages.

To start, set loose goals. Many organizations have goals that are very basic:

• I want to increase the total number of reviews; or,

• I want to increase our provider star ratings.

Before you start your review generation program, it's important to know what value it will bring to your organization. Selecting one or both of these goals can help you measure the effectiveness of your review generation program. Benchmark your generation program's performance based on a timeframe pre- and post-generation to show changes in both.

You'll also want to share these reports with various stakeholders in your organization. Based on the folder and/or label structure you've created during your review monitoring phase, this should be an easy export.

We're reaching the end of this five-part series on healthcare reputation management, but we aren't quite done yet. Next, we'll explore how to set up your reporting dashboard and what to look for to gauge the success of your online reputation management strategy. Then, we'll share an actionable checklist that turns the information we've shared in this blog series on managing your reputation into a set of practical next steps.

Until then, be sure to subscribe to the Yext blog so you never miss an update.