Did you know, it only takes 1-6 online reviews for new patients to form an opinion about your practice? Reviews can make or break your reputation.

In this post, I’ll talk about the Review Management tool that will help you get more positive patient reviews and manage them all from one place.

Why are reviews important for doctors?

Your patients will Google you and check your reviews before they even call you up. They want to know what other people have to say about your practice. Reviews play a major role in a patient’s decision-making process. Read more about The Patient Journey to understand how patients choose their doctors today.

Patients see the number of good or bad reviews your practice has received, to decide your credibility. Reviews also reflect the patient experience at your clinic. A good number of positive reviews will improve your online reputation and help you acquire new patients for your practice.

Not only that, reviews also help you rank higher on Google’s local search rankings. Your Google reviews tell Google how your patients are rating your practice when they visit your office for services. And that affects your offline prominence score which is one of the major factors that impact your Google rankings.

Google reviews are critical for ranking and overall for the success of your practice and therefore staying on top of your reviews is important.

How you get patient reviews today

You are probably asking your patients to leave you a review on Google, Healthgrades, Yelp, Trustpilot, Facebook, and other platforms. And not all patients may give you a review immediately. So you may send them an SMS or email reminder. And once you get the reviews you may manually post them onto your website and your social media accounts. You also may be watching out for any negative reviews on Google and all other platforms. Doing all of this is a tedious task.

How to effectively manage patient reviews?

You can easily manage patient reviews using the Review Management tool that can send review requests, send out auto reminders, show all your reviews, post them automatically on your website and social media, and monitor and alert you on negative reviews so you can respond in a timely manner.

The tool comes in 2 parts. There’s a widget that can be easily installed on your website in minutes. And there’s a dashboard that you can log into.

Let’s take a look at the backend or the dashboard that your staff can use to manage your patient reviews.

Setting-up your Practice Dashboard

This is a one-time setup. You need to connect your Google My Business (GMB) account and select the Google listing of your clinic. If your clinic has multiple providers or locations you may have multiple listings and you can select them all.

Once your GMB is connected you can see all your Google Reviews in the Dashboard.

You can see your total reviews, the average rating, and you can filter the reviews by:

• recent or oldest reviews
• filter by location, so if you have multiple listings, you can select a specific listing
• You can also filter reviews by the source of review – like Google or Facebook, and
• by time period.

The dashboard updates your patient reviews in real-time. You’ll receive alerts when new reviews are posted or a review needs your attention so you can respond immediately.

As a medical practice, you should always acknowledge all your reviews. If not all, definitely acknowledge and respond to the bad ones (if any). When you respond to reviews, you are not only informing your prospective patients about your practice or services, you are also showing them that you value their inputs. And this will help in building trust and get more reviews in the future.

The smart reply feature auto-suggests responses so you can save your valuable time. You can also update or delete replies.

The dashboard will also show any Google Messages you receive for any of your listings so you can stay on top of them as well.

Now let’s talk about how you can solicit quality patient reviews.

How to get quality patient reviews?

Your staff can send the “Review Request” to one or multiple contacts. You can draft a default message and even customize it for patients and send it by either email or SMS or both.

Once the message is sent, patients will get a text or email with a link. They click on the link and see a Patient Satisfaction Survey.

This survey is a set of 1-3 questions that helps you get feedback from your patients about their experience with the doctor, the treatment and the clinic. You can create your own survey form or use one from our templates and customize it to your practice. For example, you can choose the questions for the survey, and brand the form with colors and the logo of your practice.

The Patient Satisfaction Survey helps to filter out negative reviews. So for example, if a patient is happy with the treatment and overall experience at the clinic, the form automatically proceeds to ask the patient to write a review, say, on Google.

And in case some patients are not satisfied, the survey gives you a chance to understand what went wrong and an opportunity to fix the issue (if it can be fixed). Your office can then get back to the patient to sort the issue, thus avoiding patients from going to Google and posting negative reviews for your practice.

Displaying patient reviews

You can proudly show your 5 STAR Google reviews on your practice website. The widget automatically pulls all your 5-star reviews from all your locations and displays them as a feed on your testimonials page or as a carousel on your homepage. Or put it on the Doctor’s page by filtering out reviews only for that doctor.

The widget can be customized to your practice branding and colors as you can see in the example above.

Your website visitors can also click on a button and write a new review for your practice. Once your patients write a review the tool will automatically match the reviews with the contacts in your Patient CRM so you can keep track of who wrote you a review and who did not so you can send them reminders automatically.

Patient reviews play a vital role in building your online reputation, and that is why it is very important to manage these reviews properly.

3-Month Free Trial of the Review Management Tool

Simply sign-up to see a demo of the Review Management tool for free. First 50 people to sign up for a demo will receive a 3-month free use of the tool. Get Demo

About Author

Nupur Markam

I create brands for doctors on social media and help them build long lasting relationships with their patients.