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).

The people who participate in online support groups for those with terminal or chronic diseases are referred to as “e-patients.” These groups foster a patient-patient referral system. This informal system is far more reliable than the traditional doctor-doctor referrals. Patients understand what other patients are looking for and are not making referrals based on a business deal.

Why is this significant? As more and more people matriculate into these online communities, this referral system will become increasingly prominent causing patient satisfaction to skyrocket. For a patient to refer a doctor though, the doctor would have to meet and surpass that patient’s expectations. But this would not be without reward for the doctors. By keeping patients satisfied with their work, they would automatically bring in more clients. In theory, ten satisfied patients could very easily lead to one hundred satisfied patients and then to one thousand. Information spreads like wildfire on the internet and, from a doctor’s perspective, reputation management is important because just as easily as more clientele can be acquired, it can be lost. Thus with the emergence of social media oriented doctor referrals, patient satisfaction is crucial because once a doctor receives a bad review it is tough to recover. There is currently no online doctor-doctor referral system therefore both compliance and integration into this system for a doctor is not optional for the sake of their practice.

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