1. Start your strategy with the most heavily-searched-for providers in your organization — or those where you're running a lot of marketing campaigns.
If your healthcare organization is focusing heavily on one or two specific service lines, and your marketing is following suit, you can assume that people will be influenced by that marketing and will be searching in higher numbers for those providers. You will want to put your best foot forward to ensure your providers have the highest ratings possible and the best chance at showing up in search.
2. Focus on providers or specialties with the lowest average ratings.
Many organizations know that there are certain providers, provider groups, or specialties that have lower ratings online. The easiest way to increase those star ratings is simply to prioritize asking for new reviews in these specialties.
Additionally, turn your attention to providers who can drive a more lasting lifetime value to your system. It pays to think about the long-term impact of your digital presence for specific provider types who can drive long-term revenue for your health system. This is usually an opportunity to focus on asking for reviews in specialties that either drive long-term health visits (e.g., obstetrics through pediatrics) or high-reimbursement procedures (e.g., transplants).
3. Once you've identified your focus area(s), identify the timing to send your reviews.
Generally, you'll want to ask for your review as early as possible – within 24 hours of the visit. What's more, there are a lot of misconceptions around survey fatigue — and even if you are sending first party review requests, we're seeing that it won't harm those responses (it's actually improving review responses for both).
4. Consider how you want to load patient data into a review generation platform: do you want to do it manually or automate it?
We've seen many healthcare organizations opt for the automated option — but automation takes time, so some of them start with a manual upload of patient email and/or mobile phone data. The most ideal set-up is to automate your review generation.
Whether your IT team wants to build into a platform to request reviews directly from your EMR, or whether you want someone else to build it, it doesn't matter. You can always get started with a regular email / mobile phone upload while the team is building the automated workflow. The important thing is to start.
