Manish Kumar Chauhan

To make your practice grow you need to have more patients, while making sure the existing ones keep coming back. The increasing competition practices face in the health care industry has made things tough, but not impossible. Your practice needs both new patients and retention of existing ones.

Here are some ways to encourage regular patients come back to your practice.

After the first visit, it's the follow-up visit that concerns every patient visiting your practice. Scheduling a follow-up visit before a patient leaves your practice is a simple and effective way to make them a regular visitor. A prompt front-desk office person can engage with the patients and encourage them to revisit your practice. He needs to explain the need for repeated visits for treatments and be able to schedule a follow up.

It's not necessary that every patient will schedule a follow-up appointment before leaving the practice. In such a scenario, it is your responsibility to remind them through email. For the smooth execution of this process, you need to maintain a track of patients’ next visit. When you find the due date is approaching, send reminder emails or messages to encourage appointment booking. Here, don’t forget to place the online scheduling link and phone number in the email body for quick response. You can also try sending personalized postcards. Offer a reminder postcard to all patients visiting your practice. This will save you from losing any of your patients’ contact details and offer them more personalized service.

For better treatment, a patient needs to visit the doctor for his well visits, not just in sickness. This message should be well communicated to all your patients. Youngsters and healthy adults often don’t value this message. They are reluctant to go for regular visits to their doctor. You need to make them understand the need for regular appointments and health checkups, because prevention is better than cure.

A verbal education to the person visiting your practice is not necessarily the only way to explain the importance of appointments. Different modes of communication can help to spread this message quickly, such as website banners, newsletter or email campaigns, social media posts or blogs with detailed information. Nobody would want to see such an information every day, so make it a monthly or quarterly practice. You can share relevant information from reputed sources such as the American Public Health Association and others.

Make them aware of the prevention and screening services that can be availed without any financial burden. You need to proactively contact your patients and inform them of the preventive services.

Another great way to encourage patients come back is to organize health camps or programs, such as weight management, tests, physiotherapy, and diabetes management, etc. Educate patients on how these programs can help them. Use emails and flyer to promote participation. You should also request for word-of-mouth marketing to increase the number of participants.

Discounts and promotions are another way to boost patients’ re-visits. This works well with aesthetic treatments, such as skin or dental services. For instance, you can promote discounts or free consultation on the second sitting of laser or dental checkup. During checkout, pitch the offers to encourage the patients to choose you over the rest. Try to create packages, such as one service free on first three sittings, etc. In addition to informing patients while leaving your practice, you can promote these offers on your website, blog page, social media pages, or emails.

Manish Chauhan is Digital Marketing Manager at 

 which is an easy-to-use reputation management solution for physicians to help monitor, protect and promote their medical practices at all times in the simplest way possible.

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Practices are facing stiff competition in health care these days, here are five ways to ensure your patients keep coming back.

5 Ways to Encourage Patients to Come Back to Your Practice

Today, online reputation management is crucial for the survival and growth of any practice. The ever-growing competition is making it tough for practices to outshine others. So instead of getting worried about what others are doing, it’s time to learn from them and improve yourself. Let’s see how your competitors can benefit you by improving your online reputation.

Your website is the first impression a new customer will have of your practice. It is the first thing they see during their online research. So you need to have a well-designed website to make the right impression on your potential patients.

Check out your competitors’ websites to see what kind of an impression they are leaving on their visitors. Are their sites clear or cluttered? Do they have clear navigation and can they be accessed on a mobile device? Take a look at every aspect and then compare them with your website.

In addition to a good-looking website, you need to have educational and easy-to-understand content. Content includes information such as office details, your bio, specialty, and services that put the patient at ease and understand your practice in a better way.

In addition to informative content, it is necessary that you have good SEO. If your competitor outranks your website, you are likely lacking good SEO strategies and quality content. Check your competitors’ websites content and implement new ideas in your web content. Always remember your content should be unique, informative, and original.

Your online reputation is influenced by your online reviews. There are numerous review platforms such as Yelp, Healthgrades, Vitals, YellowPages, etc. that allow consumers to post reviews and others to read what users have experienced. So you need to proactively check review sites for any patient reviews and reply accordingly.

You should check what people are saying about your competitors and how are they handling reviews. Also, take a look at their ratings on various review sites. Knowing what your competitors are doing better than you can help you formulate strategies around it and improve your practice’s marketing and operations. Don’t forget to ask for reviews from your happy patients when they visit your practice or through mail and messages.

To manage your online reputation, you also need to learn how and when to interact with your customers. Responding to online reviews is one element. You should know how to deal with negative reviews without taking them personally and welcome the scope of improvement.
Social media platform, mailers, seminars, etc. are other interaction spots. You need to keep a close check on your competitors’ initiatives of interaction. You can send interactive mailers or conduct surveys to get your patients comfortable with you. Whenever your patients make a physical visit to your practice, ask them about the mode of communication they prefer and if they have anything to share about your practice or their experience.

Everyone is on some social media platform. In addition to socializing with friends and family, these platforms let you share your knowledge, reviews, concerns and much more. It has made the world a small place where anyone can be in touch with another person.

Take a look at various social media platforms to see how your competitors are replying to their patients and how are they engaging their target audiences. This analysis will help you build stronger marketing strategies.
If you don’t have an active account on social media platforms, create one as soon as possible. Implement social media marketing strategies and post relevant forms of content that showcase your thought-leader personality in front of your existing and potential patients. This will help you build a strong online reputation. 

which is an easy-to-use reputation management solution for physicians to help monitor, protect and promote their medical practices at all times in the simplest way possible.

Looking at your competitors' website, online reputation, and social media presence can help you improve your own marketing efforts.

How Can Other Practices Improve Your Online Reputation?

People's love of the internet can be witnessed by the growing number of reviews and subscribers on social media platforms. People prefer browsing the internet for every question and review sites act as a guide for them. For local businesses, BrightLocal says 

97 percent of consumers read online reviews

. This number should be enough to explain to you the importance of online reviews. Let’s understand why online reviews are important and how can you attract more positive reviews.

Your potential patients read reviews from existing patients for a clear view of your practice. Online reviews are digital word-of-mouth marketing where thousands of people read what’s said about you, thereby affecting your practice’s online reputation.

Since online reviews act as word-of-mouth marketing, people consider it as a personal recommendation. When a recommendation is posted by a friend, family, acquaintance or anyone in a patient’s network, it has a major impact. It can spread like wildfire with the help of social media channels. This chain of trust in recommendations keeps growing.

The positive reviews take the viewer to your practice website. Your potential patients want to learn more about you, your practice and services before they visit your practice. So you need to have a responsive and engaging website. Your webpage should have intricate design and different content forms such as blogs, infographics, videos, etc. to attract and retain a potential patient, leading to higher conversion rates.

To increase your online presence and build your online reputation, you need more reviews. Here's how to get more positive reviews.

Your service is the primary requisite for positive reviews. A patient happy with your treatment is sure to post a glowing review for your practice. Maybe you would need to request a patient to post a positive review, but it's worth it because a disappointed patient is sure to write harshly about your practice online. So, work on your service to get more positive reviews on all review platforms.

Launch a survey to receive feedback from your existing patients. Keep it simple with limited questions that don’t take much time for a participant to answer. Even yes/no questions can help you work on your actions. This will give you a brief about your patients’ perception of your practice. Include a star rating system which can be presented on your website.

Going back to something from the first point, patients may say they don’t post reviews because they weren’t asked to. Ask your happy patients to post feedback about your practice online when they leave your practice. A simple request will not sound like pressuring your patients. If you are a new practice, you need more reviews to let people know about your practice and if you are not a newbie, you need positive reviews to defeat your competitors.

All of this helps you build the trust of patients in your practice. It increases the transparency of your services and strengthens your online reputation. Regularly monitor your online activities and have your website listed on third-party websites as a part of the citation. Track reviews received from various review sites and social media platforms. Handle any negative comments efficiently. Don’t panic! A negative comment is not the end of the world but a stepping stone to success.

A potential patient does not read more than 10 reviews or so to decide on visiting your practice. So it is necessary to manage your reputation and reviews. Make sure your top 10 reviews are positive.
Also, your reviews should be fresh, i.e. not more than three months old. According to Search Engine Land, 69 percent of people find a review older than three months irrelevant. The searcher finds current and positive reviews trust worthy and valuable.

It's OK to ask your patients for a positive review online - it will help build your reputation with new patients.

Calling for More Positive Patient Reviews

The healthcare market is hugely competitive, giving patients numerous practice options to choose. The healthcare industry has become patient-driven. In such a scenario, patients look for a good experience and affordable service. According to a survey by Deloitte Consulting, customers chose the following statements to define positive healthcare experiences:

• "Doctor or other healthcare provider spends time with me and does not rush through the exam."

• "All my doctors and prescriptions are in-network and covered."

• "Minimal or no wait time at doctor's offices, laboratories and hospital waiting rooms."

• "Ability to schedule an appointment via my mobile device."

And all of these reflect the need for personalization in healthcare. Here, the one-size-fits-all approach will fail to satisfy your patients because everyone responds differently to a treatment, service, or drug. Personalization helps you predict the treatment required, improve the quality of care, and reduce expenditure on healthcare. What more can be done for personalization of healthcare services that would yield better revenue and more popularity to your practice?

Everyone wants to be heard and cared for. A patient who is physically, mentally or emotionally unwell wants to be heard and understood. So you need to pay special attention to them, according to their individual needs. Give appropriate time to each patient instead of rushing to accomplish the day's target. When a patient is listened to and the need for treatment is explained, she feels more involved and works on her health improvement.

Personalization also comes with clarity of costs. In addition to affordable pricing, your patients want to know what is covered by insurance. Clarity of such crucial topics grows a patient's trust in the doctor and his practice. A patient seeks information on in-network doctors, treatments covered and not covered and even out-of-network doctors and the cost of a particular service/procedure offered.

In the process of obtaining healthcare service, a patient looks forward to satisfaction with the service and no waste of time waiting for appointments. For this, you will need to offer an online appointment scheduling feature on your website. It will help your patients seek care at their convenience. Also, train your staff to offer patients delightful service that makes them visit your practice again the next time they are not well and refer you to their friends and family. You should have a patient portal page where patients can access their billing and claim data easily.

To offer more personalized experiences, you should send emails that are segmented on the basis of ailment, age, gender or location. For instance, if you email is a discussion on female-centric disease, then keep male members out of the list because this might disinterest them. Consequently, they might resist from opening your other emails. Irrelevant and frequent emails can put you in the spam folder of most of your target audience.

Reviews play a major role in defining personalized healthcare experiences for an individual. Read all reviews you receive on review platforms. Thank reviewers and rethink their issues. Address assurance of improvement of service. Negative reviews should not dishearten you, rather you should learn how to deal with bad reviews. Always follow some tips and tricks in replying reviews on various platforms or your own website. Ignoring reviews is a big disappointment for your patients that can make you lose them in the long run.

Track and evaluate your steps to check if you are able to deliver personalized healthcare experiences to your patients. Remember, this will help you achieve a loyal and long-term relationship with your existing patients, boosting word-of-mouth marketing. Also, your potential patients are likely to be influenced and attracted by such activities, increasing your practice's growth and online reputation.

Patients are increasingly interested in personalized healthcare service. Here are a few ways to provide that for them.

Author | Manish Kumar Chauhan

Articles

5 Ways to Encourage Patients to Come Back to Your Practice

How Can Other Practices Improve Your Online Reputation?

Calling for More Positive Patient Reviews

How to Personalize Your Healthcare Service