How to Create a Healthcare Reputation Management Strategy

More than ever, consumers are turning to the internet for information about your healthcare organization. Online, patients are reading – and leaving – reviews on everything from your facilities to your providers.

Approximately 90% of patients read online reviews to evaluate providers, and 69% of patients will not even consider a healthcare provider with less than a 4.0 average star rating. The message for marketers is clear: after all the time you've spent optimizing every channel in the patient journey, you simply can't afford to neglect your reviews.

Drawing on 20 years of experience helping healthcare organizations navigate an increasingly digital world, we're sharing everything we know about the basics of online reputation management for healthcare. This is the second installment of a five-part series – including four blogs and an actionable checklist for healthcare marketers – on using reviews to boost your digital presence, improve discoverability, and build trust in your brand.

Last week, we discussed the benefits of healthcare reputation management. This week, let's talk about strategy.

Just catching up? Read the previous blog in this series:

• The Benefits of Healthcare Reputation Management

Coming up next:

• FAQ: Online Reputation Management for Healthcare

• How to Measure Online Reputation Management Success in Healthcare

• [Checklist] How to Use Yext Reviews for Healthcare Reputation Management

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If you're looking to get started with reputation management, planning out a sensible, scalable strategy is priority number one. We'll outline how to do that in this blog.

But before we dive further into reputation management strategies, let's define the two kinds of reviews that a patient could find online, first-party and third-party reviews — and break down why they both matter.

First-party reviews are reviews that are sent directly to patients from the hospital (usually called HCAHPS surveys). We refer to these reviews as "first-party" reviews because they are solicited directly from your health system, and you know that the response is coming from a patient you've treated. These reviews tend to be administered by survey organizations. In many cases, these reviews are displayed on your provider and facility landing pages.

The benefit of these reviews is that you gain a lot of insight into patient experiences with your system, and the collection of the survey comments can be posted on your provider and facility pages in the name of transparency. Your first-party reviews are also a staple of a healthcare SEO strategy because they help your webpages rank better in search results.

Third-party reviews are reviews that are left on websites that you do not own or control, including Google reviews. Search engines and other websites reward organizations that have more reviews and more review interactions (e.g., review responses) when organizing search results for a searcher. And because 3 out of 4 people searching for healthcare start on a search engine, third-party reviews are an important part of the healthcare "shopping" process.

Both first- and third-party review types are important because you can learn a lot from what is said about you — and make service recovery changes based on feedback in the comments. You can even collect the reviews to promote positive feedback to your executive team members, clinic and practice managers, and individual providers. Rich data lives in review comments from patients and consumers, and it's important to collect and manage this data whenever and wherever you can.

It's important to think about first- and third-party reviews in your healthcare reputation management strategy. When you embark on a reputation management project, you should be looking to drive efficiencies and time saved in managing both — as well as to collect the feedback to share with other members of your institution.

Good news: the first step in your plan should be a simple one. You need to start monitoring your reviews. This gives you a sense of what patients are saying about you, how they rate their experiences, and how you can evaluate your performance over time.

You'll also want to set your account up for success in the future. If you use Yext for healthcare reputation management, make sure your Yext account is set up with the right folders and/or labels so that you can review your performance by different groupings. If you don't work with Yext, make sure you have an opportunity to separate your data in a way that you can start to monitor reviews by strategic areas.

Once you've set up your account to reflect how you want to look at your online reviews, you'll want to set up a baseline of information by collecting data from the various review platforms into a centralized place. At this point, you should set up a timeframe over which to monitor your reviews.

If you work with Yext, we will pull in historical reviews data from third-party platforms like Google and Yelp so that you can immediately start to see how you are performing over time. This gives you a baseline to better understand how your online reputation is at the beginning of your reputation management journey.

From here, you'll be able to set a strategy to improve your overall star rating by:

• Understanding your average star rating at a point in time (e.g., today). Once you see your starting average star rating, you might want to set a reputation management program goal to improve your overall star rating within a certain timeframe.

• Ingesting data for monitoring to get a sense of where most people are leaving reviews and where you need to focus your energies in generating reviews. Are more people leaving negative comments or reviews on social media platforms like Facebook? Are more negative reviews surfacing on WebMD? Are star ratings higher or lower on Google?

• Looking at the content of the reviews to determine what people are saying about you and your providers. Are the comments more positive or negative in nature? Are there any legal issues that need to be flagged? Based on the type of reviews people are leaving, should you create future review responses based on positive versus negative reviews?

• Determining whether you need to designate someone to manage your online reputation management strategy. Identifying the quantity of reviews that come in per month and the response strategy you'll want to craft is very important. You'll start to get a sense of the scope of the work ahead — and whether you should assign a full-time person on your team to manage your review strategy. Are you getting a significant influx of reviews? If so, you may need to carve out someone's time to respond to reviews in the future, or enlist an organization (like Yext's Managed Review Response) to respond on your behalf.

Monitoring your reviews is a very powerful first step in your healthcare reputation management journey. It is also an excellent foundation to help you understand how sentiment about your organization is changing — so make sure you keep it up even as you progress through your reputation management initiatives.

Now that you've seen what people are saying about you on third-party sites, it's time to think about how to respond to them. (You might get thousands of patient reviews per year, and responding to each one can be an all-consuming job if you don't set up the right strategy for it.)

Review response helps your digital presence, driving greater discoverability on sites like Google. That's because search engines reward recent activity/engagement on a listing over stale activity on a listing. ("Activity" includes reviews left on the listing, but also reviews responded to on the listing as well.)

And with the rise of generative artificial intelligence, AI Review Response is also helpful to reply to a high quantity of reviews. But because healthcare is a highly regulated industry, you can't just turn to a large language model like ChatGPT. Instead, an AI-powered review response strategy should use a combination of LLMs and human-in-the-loop workflows.

When a consumer writes a review of your provider or your facility, not only does Google reward that interaction with the provider or facility listing with the possibility of ranking higher, but other people who are seeking similar care may see that your organization has responded to reviews — and they might prefer you over another organization that doesn't engage.

Essentially, your goal in responding to reviews should be to:

• Increase interaction with your listings on Google and other websites so that you can contribute to improving your SEO

• Show people who are searching for and "shopping for" healthcare providers that you take feedback seriously

How to reply to patient reviews

Yext recommends you consult with your legal counsel or compliance team to create review response templates with pre-approved, HIPAA-compliant language. We also recommend adding user roles and approval-based workflows into your review response strategy. This will help ensure only appropriate, compliant responses to patient reviews. To do so, you may need a reputation management tool for your team.

Who should respond to reviews

We recommend that your reviews are managed and responded to (promptly) from one place and one team. When one stakeholder or team is responsible for responding to reviews, it's less likely that one will slip through the cracks.

How often you should respond to reviews

It's ideal to respond to every review as quickly as possible. This helps improve your organizations' visibility in search results, because responding to reviews shows search engines that you're active. However, this isn't feasible for every organization.

Depending on the volume of reviews you receive each week, you will need to make the decision that is best for your organization. You might respond to every review as soon as it's written, or perhaps only once a week, and only to reviews under three stars.

At the very least, we recommend responding to moderate to negative reviews at least once every few weeks.

Once you're monitoring and responding to reviews, it's time to start thinking about what people are actually saying in those reviews: what trends can you glean from the comments? How can you report on improvements and changes as you are seeing reviews come through? It's important to collect key themes and trends for key stakeholders in your organization.

At Yext, we call this collection of data sentiment analysis, where you can understand what is being said in reviews and whether what is being said is positive or negative — which can help you identify trends that you might not see otherwise. Other reputation management softwares may not have this feature, so be sure to evaluate your options carefully.

The best way to approach understanding review sentiment is to consider what people tend to be triggered by in your organization and create collections of terms that you want more insight into. For example, people are often triggered by the following topics:

• Billing

• Cleanliness

• Staff

• Wait Time

• Cost of Care

As you create these collections and start to review this information, your marketing team, practice or clinic managers, individual providers and executives, as well as the patient experience team, will find this information helpful.

Look at year-over-year trends or compare your collections against a specified timeframe. Is billing sentiment going up or down? Is wait time going up or down? Are people talking about wait time differently this year compared to last?

Taking a look at review sentiment is one significant way you can move your marketing team into becoming a strategic asset to your organization. You should be looking at sentiment reports at least every 2 weeks to 1 month at a time, and you should always be comparing this information to a previous time period.

In recent years, patients have started to "shop" for healthcare like they shop for cooking supplies on Amazon. They're using search engines to find care, and reading reviews to narrow down their selection.

In addition to third-party reviews on Google listings, first-party patient reviews and their respective star ratings are picked up by Google and posted on the search engine results page. Organizations can add their Press Ganey, NRC, Qualtrics, and other comments and star ratings onto provider and facility pages to see improved search ranking. This is called transparency. This also gives patients an opportunity to better understand other peoples' experiences with a provider and an organization.

Here is an example of how this same provider shows up on Google's search results page. Note the star ratings on the first natural search result, which were directly pulled from the provider's page on the health system's website.

Typically, marketing organizations work with their Patient Experience teams to access patient review data. They may also work with an external third party to help with deleting PII, patient information, profanity, and more.

This use case for your reviews is worth calling out because adding the first-party reviews to a provider's page does help with SEO.

That's why the next blog in this series is a comprehensive list of questions about accelerating and scaling your strategy. We answer lingering questions, like how to send a review to your patients, how HCAHPS surveys are different from your Google reviews, and more. Here are the answers to the most frequently asked questions about online reputation management for healthcare.

And if you're ready to jump into reputation management, download this Yext Reviews checklist to see just how easy it is to get started with reputation management with Yext.