PRACTICE MANAGEMENT | ONLINE REPUTATION |
THE PERFECT STORM RATINGS, REVIEWS, AND REGULATIONS
I 46
T’S 2015 AND WE HAVE ALL BECOME acclimated to checking reviews before booking a hotel room, choosing a restaurant or buying a laptop. Think about it. You want to take a weekend getaway with your significant other. The first thing you might do is to ask a few
friends for a recommendation. Next, you go online and do some research; you log on to TripAdvisor or Trivago and skim the first five or ten reviews. What moves you to make a split second decision on whether to book or to bolt? Comments like ‘service was slow', ‘dated facility needs an update’, ‘overpriced for what they offer’, ‘inconvenient and out of the way location’, and ‘staff was rude and inattentive', would put most of us off. Newsflash: consumers choosing healthcare services think the same way. The process is pretty much identical. As costs for healthcare have skyrocketed, people are
increasingly shopping around for doctors and comparing reviews. For Generation X and Y, they have grown up with
RateMyProfessors.com, they order their vegan sandwiches on
Seamless.com, and prowl for hook-ups on Tinder. So they have come to expect the same level of digital experience with scheduling a dental exam or a stress test that they have used in all other aspects of their lives. They live on their mobile devices and expect instant gratification and real time responses.
Patients: the new consumers Among the challenges facing physicians online is that they have very different expectations from patients. For a doctor, the way they are trained to measure quality is the end result, whether that means curing a disease, removing a tumour, or augmenting a breast. Physicians are programmed from medical school to go right to the clinical aspects. Patients think totally differently. They are more inclined to rate the touchy feely stuff, the overall experience,nce,
August/September 2015 |
prime-journal.com
WENDY LEWIS is President of Wendy Lewis & Co Ltd, Global Aesthetics Consultancy, author of 11 books, and Founder/ Editor-in-Chief of www.
beautyinthebag.com. She is a contributor to a number of trade and consumer publications in the USA and Europe.
contact
wl@wlbeauty.com
Wendy Lewis takes a look at how you can navigate the shark-infested waters of managing your online reputation
whether it was pleasant or not, if the doctor or nurse treated them well, or how long they had to wait to be seen. The inherent difference is that patients assume a certain degree of successful outcomes. They expect to be cured or to have the bump removed from their nose during a rhinoplasty. It comes with the territory. In today’s world, hiring a doctor or surgeon is akin to hiring a mechanic to tune up the motor in your BMW or a gardener to make your rose bushes blossom. There is a major disconnect between how doctors and
patients see things, and therein lies the greatest challenge in the entire review process. Although no doctor enjoys being rated like a retail store or a restaurant, and it’s hard for them to wrap their heads around the idea that patients now have this kind of control over their practices. Doctors see their relationship with patients entirely differently than other service providers do, but in actual fact, it is not all that different. Patients are consumers today. They can make or break a medical practice and impact significantly on the doctor’s lifestyle. They expect or rather demand to be treated well by the doctor and the office staff, and if they are not, they vote with their feet. But before they go somewhere else, the truth is they are likely to write about a less than ideal experience, even if it’s just to let-off some steam. After all, there are no consequences for them to consider. In fact they sometimes view physicians as they view house painters and accountants, and they don’t really give much thought to what giving a three-star rating to a physician
really means. And they probably don’t care. Negative content posted about healthcare practitioners can can directly affect the success of their practices, as more
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