Surprising Ways Your Patients Are Looking for You Online

In 2013 social media is all the rage. Facebook has an estimated 1.1 billion users, Twitter another 500 million, WordPress, 68 million unique blogs, and Reddit has 4.8 billion page views per month! With such a high concentration of people (approx. 6.5 billion) constantly browsing these sites, information is spread very rapidly. Often, that information is nothing more than cute pictures of cats. But every so often, it is actually important—“Greece’s Economy has Collapsed…again; NSA Caught Installing Cameras on Playground; Dr. Frank Enstein Fined for Malpractice.”

People that were previously considering visiting Dr. Enstein now know that they ought to consider another practice because of his recent lawsuit. According to co-authors Kevin Pho and Susan Gay in Establishing, Managing, and Protecting Your Online Reputation, 23% of social network users track other’s medical experiences via social media. And I’ve done the math for you. If 23% of the 6.5 billion people that populate the top 5 social media sites abide by this statistic that means that 1.5 billion people track other’s healthcare experiences via social media. But this huge contingent is relatively unmonitored. Doctors are not conscious of their online reputation (at least in a way that they can manage).
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The Top 3 Lines of Defense For Protecting Your Reputation Online

#1 Having Your Own Website

Online websites rating patient satisfaction have grown in prevalence and in popularity in the technological age (zocdoc, vitals, healthgrades, ratemds, drscore, etc.). The increased visibility of these detailed reviews for potential patients browsing the web has great relevance to your reputation and that of your practice and therefore demands engagement. In order to best control the online conversation regarding your practice, the number one defense for protecting your online reputation is having a website. A website with a clean aesthetic design and user-friendly interface best facilitates your voice in the online community and allows potential patients a point of reference besides solely the above mentioned patient satisfaction rating websites.

When addressing reviews from online rating websites, possible constructive responses your practice may benefit from include:

• Preemptively soliciting structured patient feedback in the form of private surveys
• Looking to improve your practice’s functionality by incorporating the informative portions of patients’ observations on your website.

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