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We rely on reviews to help us make decisions. Whether it’s choosing what movie to watch, or which restaurant to go to, online reviews have become important in our daily life. Like guiding your purchases by the star-rating a product gets, reviews are also crucial when choosing your doctor. In fact, 81% of patients look at online reviews before choosing a doctor and this number continues to rise year after year. Even more, 55% of people say that a 4-star online rating is the minimum they require to even consider a doctor.
When a patient is choosing a doctor there may be many emotions playing a role in their decision. Patients want someone they can trust. That’s why a high rating and detailed, positive reviews can really make you stand out.
Studies show that reviews generate insight into the quality of care and patient-provider relationships. This said, there are many reasons why you should consider bolstering your reviews across the web. Some of top reasons include:
- Online reviews help the patient build confidence in their choice of provider.
- Online reviews build your reputation so more patients can find you and are more likely to choose your practice.
- Patients will leave important feedback to help you make your practice better.
Want more positive reviews? Make the patient experience amazing.
It should go without saying, but the key to a great reputation as a hospital, a practice, or even an individual care provider is to make sure the patient has a great experience.
How do you do that?
Make sure you are addressing the pain points of your patients and ensuring they are realizing positive health outcomes.
Learn more about improving the patient experience
Positive health outcomes are directly related to great patient experiences. You can make it happen.
We know it is easier said than done, but even small incremental improvements mean a lot to the overall patient experience.
One area you can address right away is improving your ability to communicate with patients. One of the top complaints from patients is that connecting with their doctor is too cumbersome. At OhMD we are tackling that problem head on with a number of solutions that streamline conversation.
We could write endlessly about improving the patient experience (and we have), but in this post we are focusing on how you can make improvements in getting patients to share why they love you after you have already delighted them.
Making online review generation easy
It can be challenging to ask for reviews. As a care team member, you are focused on providing care, not seeking online reviews! The truth is though, your online presence can make or break a prospective patient’s decision to visit you. For many practices, generating a positive online reputation is an afterthought (and their Google star-ratings show it). The fact that you are even reading this shows that you are ahead of the game.
As a care team, one of your measures of success is if your patients are seeing great outcomes. Every member of your team the patient interacts with contributes to the overall experience. It is a team effort and your reputation is something everyone on the team must work to maintain. For your care team members though, review requests might be viewed as just one more thing added to their day-to-day workflows. Many healthcare staff members already feel overwhelmed by their daily tasks and the thought of even adding something else to the list of to-dos can add to their stress.
But what if you could be the hero in this situation? What if you could automate review requests?
Think of the implications of an automated review request delivered via a communication channel that the patient engages with every day. A simple text message after a patient’s appointment is a great way to generate additional feedback and ratings.
OhMD’s Reputation Management features can help you solve the issue of getting reviews for your practice. From sending personalized outreach to many patients all at once to automating your review generation workflows, OhMD can be the tool to keep your positive reputation engine humming.
Here are a couple of tools you can use right out of the box with OhMD to increase your ratings and reviews.
Broadcast Texting
OhMD’s Broadcast tool allows you to send out mass messages to patients via text with the click of a button. This Broadcast tool is a simple way to automate review requests. You won’t have to manually send a link to every individual patient anymore. Broadcast will do the work for you. Here’s how it works:
- Grab your daily patient visit list
Make a list in Excel or Google Sheets, of patients who have scheduled appointments as you go about your day. All that’s required is their first name, last name, date of birth, and their mobile number.
- Import list into OhMD Broadcast
Once the list is compiled, simply upload the patient list into the OhMD Broadcast text solution. You’ll be able to customize the automated message so each message sent has a personalized touch. Here is an example of what the Broadcast looks like before you send it.
“Hi {patient name}! Thank you for your recent visit to {practice name}. We would love your feedback on your most recent appointment with us! Please feel free to share your experience with us through the link below.”
Feel free to add variables like a patient’s name or your location so each message is tailored to them. It doesn’t require any extra work other than what you’ve already added to your uploaded spreadsheet. Include the link to write a review on your service of choice and, voilà! You are ready to start generating reviews in minutes instead of the hours it would take you to manually do individual review request outreach.
Imagine how advanced you will be compared to other practices who simply hand out review request postcards at appointment check-out.
One-to-many broadcast texting
Learn how OhMD Broadcast can send personalized messages to many patients all at one time
Autopilot
Just like Broadcasts, Autopilot automates patient review requests easily and efficiently. OhMD’s Autopilot tool creates automated conversation flows triggered by a textable keyword. Patients can text in with one word, and Autopilot will take them through a series of prompts to gather more information. For the patient it feels like a two-way conversation, but you’ll just be sitting back letting Autopilot do the work. It’s an extremely helpful automation tool for your most common communication workflows such as scheduling appointments, submitting medication refill requests, and sending out review requests.
Here’s how automating post-appointment patient review requests might look for you using Autopilot.
- Autopilot takes off
With a review generation Autopilot set up, patients texting in “Review” to your office’s textable number will trigger Autopilot to respond. In less than 5 seconds, the first question will prompt. Here’s an example of what that may look like on the patient’s end.
“Thank you for visiting our practice! One a scale from 1-5 with 5 being the best, how was your experience? Reply EXIT to cancel.”
- Autopilot lands
The patient can then respond with a number rating, triggering the next question in the flow. Autopilot is customizable so you can make choices and create branches in Autopilot’s logic as to how to handle responses.
The entire engagement can be automated on your end with flows that get you the information you need and opportunities to improve the patient experience. Patients can also opt out of the flow at any time, and you’ll see that in the patient’s chat record in case you need to jump into the conversation.
Once the patient completes the flow, it will populate over into your OhMD account in the patient’s chat. The information will show up all in one place right where the rest of your conversations are.
You can even take it a step further and drive an Autopilot conversation workflow from a Broadcast text to give you more flexibility in how you handle your outreach and feedback loop.
How would this work? You could use the Broadcast workflow to send a personalized text to all the patients who visited you today all at once with a keyword call to action in it.
For example:
“Thank you for visiting our practice today. If you would like to review your experience, text back ‘review'”
Upon the patient texting back the keyword, an Autopilot flow will kick off prompting them to provide a rating as we laid out above.
This is where the logic engine of Autopilot kicks in. If the patient delivers a low rating, you can respond with follow up questions to learn where you could improve or to reach out personally to the patient. On the flip side, if the patient delivered a very high rating, you may want to ask them for a testimonial or drive them to a review site where you want to improve your reputation.
Automate your common patient conversations
From check-ins to review requests, handle your common patient communication with automation.
Driving reviews where you need them
So now you have the outreach tools to make requesting a review a breeze. How can you streamline the review process even further?
Make it easy for the patient to get to the review site or sites you want to improve your rating on.
With the OhMD Reputation Management solution you can leverage a custom link that gives the patient options in where to go that will be most beneficial to you. This makes the process seamless for the patient and gives you some control over where you are generating reviews.
By making it incredibly easy for the patient you are ensuring that the positive experience carries over into the post-visit correspondence. One tap on a link from a text and you can land them on your review pages on sites like Google, Facebook, Yelp, and even healthcare-specific review sites like Healthgrades.
OhMD Reputation Management
Drive higher ratings and amazing reviews with the OhMD Reputation Management solution
Don’t get left behind.
If you are not currently encouraging your patients to leave reviews, you’re missing out on a major opportunity. Not only that, the odds are that your competition is already generating positive reviews around the web.
OhMD’s patient engagement solutions make it easy to get patients to leave reviews without the work becoming a burden on your care team or on your patients. We know how important reviews are for not only gaining more patients, but also learning crucial feedback to help your organization be better.
Want to learn more about how OhMD can help you with reputation management and reviews? Check out our post on how to ask for reviews.
Improving patient communication is one text away
See why over 50,000 clinicians choose OhMD for patient texting
