How to Encourage Patients to Leave Online Reviews
The following question and answers come from posts on SHSMD’s online discussion groups.*
Join the conversation at my.shsmd.org.
Q. I came back from the SHSMD Connections 2021 conference invigorated to raise the bar on everything digital. 1) Create Google business profiles for each of our providers and 2) Improve our ratings for our hospital and clinics. We've never done anything to encourage people to leave reviews, which means mostly only negative or angry patients have left them. I'd love to know what others do to encourage their happy patients to leave reviews. Have you made printed cards to give out? If so, what they do the cards say? What else do you do?
A: We use Podium and love it. In less than a year we went from 3.2 stars on Google and only about 102 reviews to close to 2,000 reviews and 4.6 stars. They integrate with your EMR and send texts automatically to every patient that is discharged. There is a dashboard you can use as well to respond to reviews, answer questions that come via text, and other features as well. It has been a very worthwhile investment for us and I highly recommend it!
This platform currently only sends texts. We get a tremendous response through text though, so we are happy with it. You can choose to have it set up to send texts whenever you would like, so ours is set to 15 minutes after discharge, but only between the hours of 10:00 a.m.to 8:00 p.m. Any time outside of those hours, it goes into a holding pattern and then is sent the next day at 10:00 a.m.
A: I worked with a smaller concierge practice and we simply sent an email form after appointments with new patients. The email listed all of the appropriate accounts, like GMB, Healthgrades, Yelp, etc. We found that the sweet spot for outreach was approximately two or three months after the patient signed up.
A: I would suggest looking into a platform such as Reputation.com or something similar, if responding to these requests yourselves starts to become overwhelming. Reputation management can be time consuming especially when handling more than a few listings. Reputation.com allows all business pages on different reputation management platforms (Yelp, Healthgrades, Google, Facebook, etc.) to be in one page and be able to respond with appropriate and approved responses.
A: We use Rater8 and love it! Their platform is really easy. Patients are sent a text or email after their appointment. We use them for patient satisfaction surveys as well as reviews. They have great analytics and have widgets for you to add to your provider's profile pages on your website. If you need a contact, let me know.
A: Our online feedback system began in the hospitality industry, among the first industries to use any type of feedback to gain both improvement in the experience, and to gain loyalty. There are basic tenets in online feedback that are employed to gain anywhere from 20% to 40% response which adds to even the score. The first and most important is relying on the affinity of the patient, deploying the survey quickly upon the part of the journey they are on, i.e., call center for appointment, check in at the location, and check out at the location (or both). The invitation should take advantage of the experience. The way questions are asked, in what order are crit ical as well as asking both NPS and CES questions. Deploying a survey to everyone during their journey is also important. I am often asked how much data is enough: One more than I have.
A: Since I'm in the healthcare analytics business, I'm posting based on personal experience from last month. I had to go to a healthcare system facility's ED. The day after my visit, they texted me a link to their Google page for a review. It had two questions: rate the visit on a scale of 1-5, I believe, and then leave a comment. They made it so easy I ended up leaving a review.
A: If anyone uses Press Ganey, they can also help you. We started a contract with them to help manage our listings. Our next phase will be to look at automated text requests for Google reviews. We found that legal and compliance were much more comfortable if we went with Press Ganey based on our existing relationship, as well as the fact that patients are already receiving text/email surveys through this company.
Q: Where do those patient reviews appear in Podium? Can you choose the platform that the review is posted on? For example, Google My Business or Healthgrades?
A: We currently have all of ours going to our GMB listing, but you can also choose other platforms like Facebook, Healthgrades and Yelp (and several others). Since we have been focusing on our Google ratings, right now we only have it set to allow the patient to leave the review on Google. However, you can configure it easily to where the patient is able to choose which platform they want to leave the review on.
Q: Since you use Rater8 for both, do patients only receive one survey or do they still receive two?
A: With Rater8, patients will receive either an email or text for the review or a four-question patient satisfaction survey. We are allowed to set the percentage that get surveys versus reviews depending on what our goals are. We also get to set the percentage of where those reviews go (i.e., Google, Facebook, Healthgrades). We are currently seeing a 31% participation rater across the board. For surveys, we worked with Rater8 to develop 12 areas we wanted our patient's feedback on but the four that are sent to people are randomly selected. They have found participation rates are higher with fewer questions. We've been working with them since May, and are happy with the platform.
Q: Who manages this system in Podium and answers questions that come via text? What are other features you use for your hospital?
A: My team currently monitors the reviews and replies. I have taken most of the replying on as my responsibility. We do not get a lot of questions submitted through this though. And when we do, it's typically someone using messenger services through Facebook or Google, and it's typically a medical question that we aren't qualified to answer. Our standard response is always to contact their primary care provider, or if they feel they are having a medical emergency to go to the closest emergency room or call 9-1-1.
As far as other features go, on occasion we will use it to send a text message to a large group of people. That's fairly easy to do using an Excel spreadsheet and a template provided by Podium. It also doesn't cost any extra because it came with the review package we purchased.
Q: Our quality department sends out a patient satisfaction survey for tracking/ranking purposes via text and email after a patient receives care at one of our clinics, the ER or med/surg. Does your health system do this as well? If so, were you able to combine Podium with the patient satisfaction survey so that the patient was not receiving multiple review/survey requests? Or does your health system send out separate messaging for both?
A: Our health system has both the Podium messages that go out, as well as HCAHPS surveys from PRC. As a result, patients end up being contacted twice for survey purposes, which is not ideal. We tried to word the two different survey messages so that patients would understand they were two separate things.
Q: I am curious if your compliance and privacy folks require you to get a separate pre-review request authorization from patients? Ours is recommending we do so because they do not believe this is covered under the "Operations" part of Patient Privacy and Rights document. They feel reviews qualify as marketing (not a feedback survey) because they post to Google, Facebook or other social sites. Any insight on this and how hospitals/systems navigated this would be greatly appreciated.
A: We had a discussion with our compliance officer and IT department prior to launching with them. We were told is that it is implied consent, and that as long as they have an option to opt-out when the first text is received, we are good to go.
A: We ran it by our lawyers just to be sure and they gave us approval to move ahead. In addition, we spoke with three existing practices that Rater8 works with before we implemented the platform and asked a variety of questions. Privacy was one of them and when asked neither brought it up as an issue. We are a specialty practice with orthopedics, rheumatology and pain management, but I'm sure the same rules may apply to hospital systems.
*The answers to the above question are excerpts from MySHSMD discussions. In some instances the responses have been edited for grammar and/or brevity purposes for Community Connections.
Please visit MySHSMD to read the detailed thread and connect with the responding members.
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