FEATURE


Reputation management


Your approach to online profiles and patient ratings should be proactive, not reactive


By Jennifer J. Salopek I


t’s been said that doctors approach online profiles and patient ratings in a style that mimics the five stages of grief—denial, anger, bargaining,


depression and acceptance. If you’re still in the denial stage, consider: Research by the Pew Internet and American Life Project showed that, in 2012, 72 percent of internet users said they’d looked online for health information in the previous year. They were looking most often for information about health conditions and symptoms, treatments and doctors. Findings by Manhattan Research in the same year revealed that 54 percent of respondents “did online research to determine what services they might need and who should provide them.” Indeed, the American Medical Association was already warning then that “physicians who don’t manage their online presence run the risk of failing to attract new patients.”


Let’s try to move to acceptance by considering that, four years on, those numbers are probably even larger. The internet is a fact of everyday life. Pew is no longer researching whether patients are conducting health research online; they are delving into much deeper questions such as how mobile technology can be deployed for population health support, patients’ access to evidence and how patients form virtual communities.


Further, you’re probably a reader or writer of online reviews and ratings yourself. Whether it’s Angie’s List for a contractor, Trip Advisor for a hotel, Yelp for a restaurant or Amazon for everything else, you personally can attest to the value


14 IR QUARTERLY | SPRING 2016


of learning from the experiences of those who have gone before. Patients feel the same way—but with far greater emotional investment—about finding a doctor and a medical practice. They want to know what you’re like before they meet you—and it’s possible that they will want to tell other patients about their experience.


“Many patients know about you already from Google searches,” says Kevin Pho, MD, creator of the popular KevinMD blog and author of Establishing, Managing, and Protecting Your Online Reputation: A Social Media Guide for Physicians and Medical Practices (Greenbranch Publishing, 2013). “A physician’s online presence is key, and it’s in their best interest to control it.”


Resistance is futile The alternative is such third-party (meaning not yours or your employer’s) sites as HealthGrades and Vitals. HealthGrades has profiles for every doctor in the United States—over 1 million, about half of whom are currently practicing—and more than 3.5 million allied health professionals. The site receives 30 million visits per month, according to Chief Strategy Officer Evan Marks. The profiles contain contact information, board certifications, specializations and any disciplinary activity.


Marks recommends that doctors be as aware of online profiles as they would be of appearing in any publication, and that you should review your HealthGrades (and any other) profile to ensure the information is accurate.


In 2004–2005, HealthGrades inaugurated its patient experience survey. More than 6.5 million surveys have been completed and published. Anyone can click on a link in a physician profile to complete a survey; the only safeguard to authenticity is that the person “must attest that they were a patient” of that provider, according to Marks. The survey asks about the appointment process, the conduct of office staff, cleanliness, the doctor’s listening skills and whether the patient would recommend the provider to others. In early 2016, HealthGrades introduced an area for open text comments.


“The key piece that physicians must understand is that we all have online profiles, whether we like it or not,” says Richard Duszak, MD, FSIR, professor and vice chair for health policy and practice in the department of radiology and imaging sciences at Emory University School of Medicine, Atlanta. He points out that third- party sites have significant downsides: “The quality is thin, the accuracy is variable, and your ability to correct it is small.”


The best defense is


a strong offense To counter these limitations, experts recommend creating and managing your own online profiles in order to control results through search engine optimization. In other words, you want your profile to be as accurate, complete and robust as possible, so that it will end up at the top of a patient’s search results. (Research shows that as few as 10 percent of online searchers venture past the first page of results.)


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40