Everybody does it. More or less every type of online business collects customer feedback, and they do it for a very good reason. Several very good reasons, in fact!
In today’s world, it’s vital for medical professionals to stay ahead, and that means making every effort to collect feedback from patients. Positive reviews help your practice or clinic engage with new patients, and make great decisions, but they’re also a reliable way to pin down any gaps in care or places where the patient experience can be improved.
At the end of the day collecting patient feedback helps experts like you to improve patient satisfaction. It allows patients themselves to feel they play a role in the quality of their own medical treatment and healthcare and the care of their fellow patients. If you’d like to grow as a healthcare provider thanks to the free insight provided by patient reviews, here are the four most important reasons why collecting patient feedback matters.
- Improving patient engagement
Giving patients the chance to give their feedback about their care experiences makes them feel valued. When a person feels valued they’re more likely to be fully engaged with their treatment and the people who are providing it. They even tend to enjoy better overall health outcomes as well as feeling a stronger sense of loyalty to your practice. - Keeping your patients for longer
Like all businesses, healthcare providers need to make a reasonable profit. Marketing wisdom says it costs more to win a new patient than it does to retain an existing patient, and that means everything you can do to keep patients loyal, keep people coming back, has a worthwhile financial value attached.
Collecting patient feedback, then using the insight you gain to create a strong online presence is a proven tactic to boost patient retention. - Caring better for your patients
It’s a Catch 22 situation: when you don’t fully understand a patient’s experience, it’s a challenge to see how that experience can be improved. It’s important to identify any gaps in the patient journey where you could do better and please people more, help them more, reassure them more. When the patient experience goes smoothly and well, delighting people at every stage, you’ve gained a useful edge over your competitors. Collecting patient feedback helps identify potential gaps in care and also helps you to measure the progress you’re making towards vital patient-centred goals.
Guesswork doesn’t deliver the insight you need in a world where reviews and feedback affect the way people feel about every service they use. In fact, patients will more than likely expect you to ask for a review, as well as fully expecting you to take their feedback seriously.
When you place people’s expectations at the top of your priority list, online reviews help you to deliver the exact levels of care and support your patients expect. You can ask patients about many things, including appointment setting, waiting times, the quality of the welcome they experience, the doctor’s bedside manner, the thoroughness of any investigations, the practice’s communication levels and professionalism. The more questions you ask, the clearer your 360-degree view of the patient experience is, and the more obvious the ways to improve it become. - Managing your reputation
Did you know that ‘spending as little as 10 minutes a week cultivating your online presence and addressing feedback publicly reduces the impact of negative reviews by up to 70 per cent’? As found in a 2019 study published on Software Advice. It’s clear that more patients than ever are looking online to find the best healthcare provider, which makes reputation management more important than ever before.
The search engine results are often the first impression a patient has of your facility. If they click through to your site and either see very little feedback or a string of negative reviews, their trust in you will take a knock. If someone has hundreds of good and reasonable reviews, a realistic balance on your website, they’ll be more likely to make an appointment with you.
It’s also reassuring, as a patient, so see consultants personally responding to patient reviews and feedback online. It’s a reliable way to demonstrate how you and your people are available, accountable, easy to engage with, and confident enough to ask people for reviews in the first place.
Start collecting patient reviews now!
If you don’t already collect patient reviews, now’s your chance to join one of the most dramatic and positive revolutions the world of marketing has ever seen. Doctify lets you take control of your online reputation, drive patient engagement with your practice, collect, share, and manage patient feedback. Ultimately it means you’ll have the insight you need to improve overall patient satisfaction, which in turn means higher patient retention, which means you can grow your business.
