Best Practice: Responding to Online Reviews
What to avoid in responses to online reviews
- Take caution not to acknowledge that the reviewer is a patient. Even a statement such as, “We’re sorry you experienced a long wait to check in for your appointment” confirms the reviewer was seen at your practice.
- Don’t repeat any information given in the review. If the reviewer states their treatment for a certain condition was ineffective, don’t discuss that condition or treatment by name.
- Avoid getting defensive. You may disagree with the review, but prospective patients may shy away from your practice if your responses are defensive or argumentative.
Best practices for responding to online reviews
- Thank the reviewer. A simple “Thank you for taking the time to leave a review” is appropriate. Be cautious not to thank them for their feedback about their visit, as this would be confirming their status as a patient.
- Keep it brief. Use generic terminology and keep your response short and simple.
- Use response templates. Create generic, canned responses that include a simple “thank you” and contact information. For example, a canned response for a negative review might be: Thank you for leaving a review. Please contact our [Position Title] at [Phone or Email] so we can learn more.
Hope McCain March 3rd, 2021 Categories: Anesthesia, Best Practices, featured, Outpatient Practice, Patient Experience, Product Features, Reputation Management
Tags: hipaa, HIPAA compliant, online reputation, online reviews, patient experience, patient privacyNew! Monthly Trend Report
Hope McCain December 11th, 2020 Categories: featured, Patient Experience, Product Features
Tags: notifications, patient experiencePublic Review Just Got Better! Boost Your Google Business Reviews with this New Feature
Nearly 90 percent of patients look to online reviews when choosing a physician, so increasing a positive presence online is more important than ever.
SurveyVitals’ Public Review feature helped healthcare providers and organizations proactively build their online reputation and improve their search rank in 2019. The feature drives verified patients to leave public reviews about their experiences on a page hosted by SurveyVitals and indexed by Google, allowing prospective patients to find you more easily online.
Since its launch this year, over 200,000 verified patients have posted online ratings using Public Review, and 98% of those reviews scored 4 out of 5 stars or higher. Using our composite scoring algorithm ensures patients’ public star ratings are more reflective of their visit, rather than a single aspect of their experience.
Public Review is an important tool that allows healthcare organizations and providers to build a brand on the web. However, we also want to help get you more positive reviews where they matter the most. Google accounts for 57.5% of all online reviews worldwide, far superseding other online review platforms. If you have only a handful of Google reviews, a one- or two-star rating can drag your overall rating down.
Public Review + GoogleWe’ve enhanced our Public Review feature to give you a two-pronged approach to building your online reputation. The newest expansion of the tool allows you to better incorporate your Google Business pages into your SEO strategy. Use Public Review to boost your volume of reviews by driving a percentage of your verified patients to your Google Business review pages.
Setup is quick and easy. Add your Google Business review link to your Public Review settings within your SurveyVitals portal, and specify a percentage of your patients to route directly to this page upon completion of a survey. You can link to the Google Business reviews page for the whole organization or separate pages for each of your practice locations.
That’s it! To schedule a demo or learn more, chat with us using the blue chat icon below.
blake December 13th, 2019 Categories: featured, Patient Experience, Product Features, Reputation Management
Tags: google, New Feature, New Functionality, online ratings, online reputation, online reviews, patient experience, Patient feedback, Patient Satisfaction, Public Review, SurveysFeature Highlight: Challenge Mode
Have you set up a challenge yet? Using Challenge Mode, you can create a competition between your providers to encourage improvement. Once the competition is live, you can monitor the results in real-time from your dashboard.
During Challenge Mode setup, choose questions or question areas you want to focus on. At the end of the challenge, the clinician with the highest scores in these categories is deemed the winner.
Note that you must be an administrative user with ‘Organization’ permissions to launch a challenge. From the ‘Challenge’ tab in your portal, you can view current challenges, leaderboards, and historical data.
Why create a challenge?
Challenges can create a bit of friendly competition among clinicians. Target questions or question areas where you would like to see improvement in patient experience scores. This can be a fun way to start some friendly competition and encourage provider engagement. Offer prizes or other incentives to encourage providers to achieve the highest possible scores.
Setting up a challenge
Ready to get started? Here’s how to set up a challenge:
Navigate to the Challenge page within your portal.
On the Challenge page, click “+Create” and follow the prompts as they appear in the pop-up menu.
Participants will receive an email notifying them of the challenge. Once enough surveys have been collected, results will automatically update in the leaderboard. Clinicians can check the rankings from their portal login.
More resources
For more information about Challenge Mode, check out the resources in the Help section, or contact your dedicated support team members.
blake September 9th, 2019 Categories: featured, Patient Experience, Product Features
Tags: challenge, Improvement, patient experience, PortalBreakout Provider Performance by Location
SurveyVitals has enhanced the Location & Provider Details reporting feature to optimize how organization and division-level users capture provider performance.
Location & Provider Details allows organization and division-level users to quickly filter, sort, and rank division and provider performance for the whole organization. This time-saving tool eliminates the work of running custom reports and organizing data.
Based on client feedback, the Location & Provider Details data models have been updated to provide a more granular look at your organization’s data and individual provider performance across locations.
Provider Performance by Division
Organization-level users will continue to see all providers and their performance across all divisions where they practice. Division-level users will now see only the providers and their performance data for that particular division. At this level of granularity, the data becomes more pertinent by giving division leaders and clinicians a better sense of how providers interact with patients in different locations and settings.
Location codes and provider NPIs have also been added to the Location & Provider Details data. This information may be useful to match up providers and locations appropriately when downloading raw data.
Provider Scorecard
You can compare a provider’s individual performance across locations by viewing the new provider scorecard. Simply click the name of any provider in the report results to view this data.
The scorecard allows you to see how a provider is performing at one location versus another or overall. For example, the scorecard below shows the provider performing in the 100th percentile for some question groups at certain locations, but in the 1st and 3rd percentile for the same question groups at different locations.
Benchmarks
Organization, National, and Specialty benchmarks have been added to provide ease of use for users who want to see a breakdown of their provider or location performance and compare it to the national average and specialty benchmarks. These benchmarks can be added to division-level data as well as the provider scorecards.
Questions?
Want to know more about Location & Provider Details? Contact our support team today or reach out to us. You can also always drop us a message using the blue chat icon below.
blake July 25th, 2019 Categories: featured, Patient Experience, Product Features
Tags: benchmarks, Improvement, New Functionality, patient experience, Patient Satisfaction, Portal, reportingFive Features You Might Not Be Using but Should
With SurveyVitals’ comprehensive solution, you have access to all of our features without any extra cost. It’s likely you’re using our robust reporting tools, but are you taking full advantage of everything your solution has to offer? Here are five SurveyVitals features you should consider incorporating into your improvement strategy today.
1) Comment Sentiment Analysis
Sentiment analysis was rolled out with SurveyVitals’ recent Report Builder upgrade. Using natural language processing (NLP) and a machine-learning algorithm, sentiment analysis helps you gain a better understanding of your patient comments by providing tonal and sentiment insights.
Text comments can be sorted by sentiment ranking to help you identify the most critical feedback. Sentiment analysis saves you time and drives a higher awareness of your patient experience. See your comment analysis today by using the ‘Report Builder’ in your portal.
2) Improvement Center
You’ve reviewed your data and you know your improvement priorities, but that’s only the first step. Improvement can be overwhelming. Using input from top performers combined with extensive scientific-based research into the patient experience, we created the Improvement Center. Log in to your portal today to access dozens of articles and videos to gain a better understanding of the behaviors that contribute to higher patient satisfaction. Simply click ‘Improvement Center’ in the left navigation of your portal.
3) Challenge Mode
Challenge Mode is an excellent way to boost user engagement and drive improvement. Administrators can issue challenges to providers throughout the organization and focus on specific survey questions or question areas. Then watch as participants work to rise to the top of the leaderboard! Scores are tracked throughout the specified challenge timeframe and providers can see how their scores compare to their peers. Start using Challenge Mode today by clicking ‘Challenge’ in the left navigation on your portal.
4) Email Alerts
We know you’re busy, and checking in on the portal can easily get away from you. From instant low-score alerts to bi-weekly kudos emails, our email alerts keep you up to date on your performance. Alerts are designed to provide constant awareness of your strongest areas as well as highlight your improvement opportunities.
Alerts can be enabled by an administrator on the ‘Manage Users’ page.
5) Survey Customization
Did you know you can personalize the survey requests sent to patients for all three modes of contact? Customizing these requests adds a level of familiarity, which may contribute to higher response rates and more accurate feedback.
To customize survey requests, access the options under the ‘Survey Settings’ tab in the left navigation in your portal.
blake July 23rd, 2019 Categories: featured, Patient Experience, Product Features
Tags: Alerts, Improvement, notifications, patient experience, Portal, Surveys, user managementUnderstand Patient Needs with Sentiment Analysis
SurveyVitals has long helped our clients gain a better understanding of patient comments with semantic keyword analysis. With the release of our new Report Builder, we’re taking comment analysis to the next level with sentiment reporting.
A recent review of SurveyVitals data showed that 36% of patients leave at least one comment when responding to our digital surveys. In a March 2019 patient experience study conducted by NEJM Catalyst Insights Council, 97% of clinicians agreed that listening to a patient’s voice helps improve care. Patient comments give context to Likert-scale scores, helping to bring the data to life.
Comments are vital to understanding your patients’ needs, but reading through hundreds–or even thousands–of them can be time-consuming. SurveyVitals is excited to introduce our new sentiment analysis tool to help you gain deeper, faster insights.
How does it work?Our sentiment analysis uses natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning algorithm to provide tonal or sentiment insights for text comments. The sentiment process, provided by Amazon Web Services, measures how positive, neutral, mixed, or negative a full comment is. Unlike semantic keyword analysis, sentiment measures the overall tone of the comment–for example, it looks for negation keywords such as ‘not’ in conjunction with emotional keywords for a better understanding (e.g., ‘The doctor made me not feel so afraid’).
Identifying the most critical feedback has never been easier. The ability to sort by positive, negative, mixed, and neutral sentiment scores allows for quick identification of the best and worst comments. Sorting by these scores or searching keywords may also be beneficial in reviewing comments for trends and prevailing concerns.
Sentiment analysis saves you time, drives awareness, and helps you to better understand your data and implement change.
Have questions or feedback about sentiment analysis? Reach out via the blue chat icon below or contact a member of your support team today.
blake June 25th, 2019 Categories: featured, Patient Experience, Product Features
Tags: comment analysis, comments, keyword, patient experience, Patient feedback, reporting, semantic, sentimentLow Score Alerts Revamped To Include Mean Score
Expect alert emails to look a bit different when they hit your inboxes this week! Based on client feedback, we’ve updated alerts emails with a sleek new interface and made it easier for clinicians to view trends in performance.
Previous alert emails included the display of a provider’s percentile rank over time for the corresponding question area(s). When looking at short performance periods, a higher beta sometimes caused variability in rank which made it more difficult to track individual performance. The updated email alerts will now show mean score over time, making it easier for providers to gauge both an increase or decrease in scores over the last 90 days.
When email alerts are enabled, providers receive instant email notifications including the question, score, mean versus time, best practices, and links to other improvement resources (example image above).
If you aren’t receiving email alerts, talk to your administrator today about enabling them. Low score alerts help drive improvement by providing continuous, instant awareness of patient concerns. Simply turning on these alerts has been proven to drive improvement with no additional coaching.
Have questions about alerts and notifications, or need help enabling them? Contact us using the blue chat icon below!
blake June 20th, 2019 Categories: featured, Patient Experience, Product Features
Tags: Alerts, Improvement, notifications, patient experience, Patient feedback, Patient Satisfaction
New Feature: SPSQ Low Score Comment Prompts
Better understand patient concerns with our low-score survey logic, now included on our Standard Patient Satisfaction Questionnaire (SPSQ). When patients select a score of a ‘1’ or ‘2’ on the five-point Likert scale for any standard survey question, they will be prompted to leave a comment describing their experience in that area.
The long-term use of this feature on our Anesthesia Patient Satisfaction Questionnaire (APSQ2) has been effective in helping providers to better understand trends and improvement opportunities in specific areas. These prompts encourage patients to include details about a specific part of their experience, providing deeper insights than often gained with generalized comment prompts at the end of a survey. Please note, there will be no change to the existing SPSQ comment questions with the addition of the low score prompts.
To gain even more insight from your patient feedback, use our sentiment analysis tool to review patient low score comments. This will help you to identify the most critical feedback quickly.
Have questions about this new feature or the SPSQ survey? Chat with us using the blue chat icon below, or reach out to your client account manager. Interested in learning more about SurveyVitals? Request a demo of the solution here.
blake December 16th, 2019 Categories: featured, Outpatient Practice, Patient Experience, Product Features
Tags: Improvement, low score, New Feature, New Functionality, notifications, outpatient, patient comments, patient experience, Patient feedback, Patient Satisfaction, reporting