To understand the importance of reputation in your medical or dental practices’ growth, you need to understand what reputation exactly means.
Reputation is a widespread belief or opinion that someone has about you, even if they have never met you. Reputation and brand awareness generate trust and affect the decisions of current and future patients.
A good reputation is an important asset for all healthcare providers. It is pivotal to attract self-reliant, quality conscious and cost-aware patients. If you are a dentist, doctor, chiropractor, or veterinarian you need to develop a culture among your employees as well, to create a positive patient experience. Building and maintaining your reputation is not just the responsibility of the provider, but the outcome of their team that will lead to positive practice growth.
How to build your Reputation?
- To build a great reputation, start with a great doctor-patient relationship. This attribute of patient relationship management includes patient education, efficient appointment scheduling, effective communication and short appointment wait time. This will assist in creating brand awareness for your practice and sustaining it as your patients become word-of-mouth advocates.
- Patients to advocates: Increase transparency regarding your messaging to patients on the quality of your care and focus on the results of what is done in order to improve patient outcomes. Let them start to spread the message for you about the stellar care you provide.
- Online Reviews for reputation building and management: 77% of patients look to online review sites prior to selecting their provider. Social media platforms as information repositories have become very important for a healthcare provider’s reputation and its selection by partners – especially with millennials, well-educated patients, and potential employees. Even your employees can become influencers and bolster internal marketing if they feel pride in your practice.
- Competition to acquire new patients has grown in a hockey-stick curve with the advent of technology. The trend of medical tourism is here to stay and already has a lucrative market. A whole new advertising industry has grown around providers competing for increasing patient inflow from the U.S and abroad. Many of the healthcare providers now employ their own advertising departments and run large scale online Google ads and TV commercial campaigns.
- Cutting edge diagnostic technologies and high performance IT help healthcare providers to achieve efficient cost management. Technology becomes a business enabler and should be taken into account when addressing reputation. For more information, contact IntellaHealth.
- Medical Tourism – Attraction for patients around the world –Driven by reputation: Excellent medical quality and affordable services, a good international network/reputation and a focus on the needs of foreign patients’ drives in the (foreigners) patient inflow. The global market volume for medical tourism is around $45 billion, based on 11 million cross-border patients spending an average of $3500-5000 per visit worldwide. According to OECD, the most popular medical treatments are dental care, cosmetic surgery, elective surgery and fertility treatment. Generally, the global trend is – 1 out of 8 patients are going abroad for cheaper medical treatment. According to a study by McKinsey, advanced technology, better quality of care and quicker access to necessary medical therapies are the main drivers for medical tourism and building reputation.
Hope this review was useful to help you understand on – How to build a reputation and manage your online reputation for your healthcare practice.
For more information on Reputation Monitoring and Building; digital marketing techniques for healthcare providers, contact Dr. Kristine Grace at KristineG@IntellaHealth.net.
by Kristine Grace, Mar-16-2017