6 Effective Ideas For Great Patient Reviews: A Guide For 2022

It not just about looking popular in the industry, it’s about engaging patients and making meaningful connections, which will serve to boost your brand awareness and ROI both online and offline.

Read on this ultimate guide for the effective ideas to improve your patient reviews

1. Pay attention to your patients

Pay attention, because this is the most important step in converting great patient care into great reviews and referrals. You want to compel your patients to rave about your practice. How do you do that? By elevating your care standards and honing in on the patient journey.

Enhancing the patient experience can be done in many ways. First, consider each step of the patient journey to identify which interactions you can improve.

Additional factors might include how easily a patient can schedule an appointment, whether by phone or on your website, and how soon they can reasonably expect to be seen by a practitioner.

Once patients have arrived at your practice, ensure each in-office interaction is optimized to make the patient feel welcome and at ease. A receptionist who acknowledges the patient – even if he or she is busy –  a comfortable waiting area, and a friendly, inviting atmosphere all go a long way when enhancing the patient journey.

2. Team work makes the great work

When it comes to achieving high patient reviews, patient loyalty, and referrals, you’re all in this together. Here’s the truth, every single person on your practice team has the power to positively impact each patient experience. They also have the power to disrupt that journey.

Your clinical staff already knows the value of good patient reviews and how their role impacts the online “health score” of your practice.  But do your administrators, secretaries or billing experts know that their roles also contribute to the overall energy within your practice?

Be direct and clear about your intentions to set the standard for patient care. Ensure that every staff member, from the physician to the receptionist, understands the goal; to gain great practice reviews through enhancement of the patient experience. 

3. Sign up for reputable review sites

Fortunately, the process of signing up your medical practice with each of these websites is basic and straightforward. To sign up for a Healthgrades account, simply visit their account registration page, complete the remaining fields, and choose ‘register now.’ To claim or create a ZocDoc profile, head on over to their joining page and review your pricing options. Then, complete the ‘Join ZocDoc’ form and wait for the confirmation page to notify you that an authorized representative will be in touch for your free demo.

You may also find the crowd-sourced review site Yelp to be beneficial, due to its widespread familiarity among well-informed consumers. Yelp’s platform permits reviews of all kinds and practice managers cannot remove reviews that don’t paint the practice in the greatest light.

Instead of this being a reason to dread a negative review, it could be used to your advantage. Most Yelp users know and appreciate that the site won’t remove a bad review, so if a potential patient sees that all your Yelp reviewers have left you 5-stars, they’ll know the rating is genuine.

RELATED: 8 Best Strategies To Improve Patient Engagement In Primary Care

4. Encourage staff to gather those great reviews

While it is never recommended that you incentivize patients to provide favorable reviews, incentives can be a highly effective way to motivate your staff to elicit them. Team incentive programs based on the number of review requests sent out or on positive reviews obtained would depend on your operational preferences, just be sure to implement safeguards to maintain the integrity of the program.

Actual patients (not staff’s friends or family members) should be the ones leaving reviews to qualify your team for employee incentives. Once the goal is met, the reward should be something everyone can enjoy, like an office party or a special group night out.

5. Ask patients on social media

According to Statista, more than 80 percent of all Americans are on social media. This means that Facebook, Twitter, and other similar platforms are the perfect places to connect with patients and ask them to share their positive experiences with others.

RELATED: Moving Towards The Future Of Patient Engagement

6. Sending e-mail review requests

This method is a lot of work for some hospitals. It’s worth noting that implementing text messages requests will avoid the challenges of email, and result in similar benefits.

Email review requests can be automatically sent out to patients after a hospital visit, so it doesn’t rely on your staff. An email is a nice option since you can provide a link to your business on Google which makes it easy for patients to get to your page.

Right strategies leads to great reviews

More patients talking about you means more referrals and a greater level of trust from your community. And that means more patients choosing you when it comes time for medical care for themselves and their families. Being strategic when deciding how to ask for patient reviews can lead to happy patients, higher efficiency, and greater hospital profitability.

With an effective review request system, you can improve your average star rating and increase your number of online reviews. A robust and customizable reputation management system built specifically for the hospitals can automatically help you collect private feedback, understand both positive and negative patient experiences, encourage happy patients to leave online reviews, and correct the issues that are leading to dissatisfied patients.

You can rise above the competition if you take the right steps to get more patient reviews and continually improve your hospital reputation.

Final Thoughts

In today’s patient-centric digital age, the best way to attract new patients is to nurture a diverse supply of great reviews. Poor reviews, or worse – no reviews – can keep your practice from growing and thriving. Providing excellent care worthy of rave reviews and incorporating patient review processes into your practice operations are two important factors in developing a sustainable pipeline of positive online reviews.

When you encourage happy patients to contribute, make it as seamless and convenient as possible. By converting great patient care into great patient reviews, you’ll be well on your way to practice growth and success.

Want to improve your patient experience and engage your patients effectively? Check out how Vozo helps you in improving your practice growth.