Can your practice survive a bad online review?
Industry Buzz
It is a good way to get patient feedback, but do not obsess over the comments. The thing to pay attention to is when the feedback tends to have a theme and patients keep reporting the same complaints.
—Elena Zamora, MD
For the younger generations of docs—those who grew up as digital natives—the idea of patients rating doctors, as they would plumbers or restaurants, may seem perfectly normal; for older physicians, it may seem somewhat crude—aren’t patients supposed to find their way to a doctor by word of mouth from other patients or by referral from a PCP?
Regardless, online reviews are just a regular part of practice, and many doctors have resigned themselves to the fact they are going to be reviewed and rated like any other service provider—either on physician-specific sites like Healthgrades, or via social media videos with the potential to go viral (for better or for worse).
A question then arises: How does a bad review affect a physician’s practice? And do one or two bad reviews doom a medical practice to failure?
Related: What to do when facing a malpractice lawsuitCan your practice survive a bad online review?
The short answer is—yes; your practice will likely persist through even the most damning review. In part, this is because patients who search online for a doctor are generally savvy about consumer sites and know to take both the most glowing reviews and the most scathing with a grain of salt.
As one medical practice management consultant wrote in Medical Economics, “Online physician reviews are written predominantly by patients who are either delighted or disgusted by their most recent experience with your practice.”[]
Consumers know that no restaurant, hardware store, or medical practice can please every patient all of the time. In addition, the overall trend among a physician’s online reviews has the greatest impact on how consumers view the practice. In fact, one or two bad reviews among a series of generally favorable reviews may strike the consumer as outliers, lending greater credibility to the good reviews and increasing the overall positive perception of the practice.
Moreover, consumers generally reward physicians with good reviews just for doing their job. One study in JAMA Facial Plastic Surgery found that the top-three reasons why a patient gave a physician a 5-star rating on Yelp were good bedside manner, a perception that the doctor seemed knowledgeable, and how well the patient liked their results.
Conversely, patients gave physicians 1-star ratings when they thought the doctor had a poor bedside manner, when they felt pressured or lied to by the doctor, and when they perceived the office staff as rude. That is, if doctors treat patients with kindness and respect, know their field, and provide patients with good care, they are likely to receive good online reviews. On the other hand, if doctors seem uncaring, appear to pressure patients into treatments or procedures they don’t want, and have an office staff that is not up to par, they can expect to receive at least some negative reviews online.
Your takeaway
As much as the occasional negative review may hurt, it can also help make you a better doctor—as long as you try to take it as constructive criticism rather than baseless critique. (But as all docs know, some negative reviews are truly just that: A frustrated patient misdirecting their anger at their doctor.)
When you receive a negative review, pay attention to the complaints, do your best to understand the critique from the patient’s perspective, and see if there is something you or your staff can do the correct the problem to avoid making the same mistake in the future.
“It is a good way to get patient feedback, but do not obsess over the comments," Elena Zamora, MD, told MDLinx. “The thing to pay attention to is when the feedback tends to have a theme and patients keep reporting the same complaints." []
Online reviews are here to stay, for medical practices as much as for the local bar and grill. Doctors may as well learn to live with them and perhaps even to learn from them.
Related: What separates good doctors from bad ones?