How Ochsner Health has created a review-based culture: 2 takeaways + 5 tips for a review-based culture

Your online reputation is critical to your practice's growth plan. The reason? Most patients start their healthcare journeys by reading online reviews.

Practices that encourage frequent reviews of their facilities, providers, staff, and services can improve patient acquisition and retention while also adding the bonus of identifying opportunities for improvement.

During a May virtual session, hosted by Becker's Hospital Review and sponsored by Podium, Hally Pinaud, vice president of product marketing at Podium, and Paige Entwisle, digital content supervisor at Ochsner Health—Louisiana's largest nonprofit academic healthcare system—discussed how healthcare practices can create a review-based culture.

Here are two key takeaways from the discussion:

• Online reviews are critical for patient acquisition, growth, and retention.
  According to Ms. Pinaud, who cited a Healthgrades blog, 84 percent of patients use online reviews to evaluate physicians, 80 percent of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations from family or friends, and 77 percent of patients rely on online reviews as their first step to finding a new doctor. "This is truly what we consider digital word-of-mouth," she said.
  
  
• Ochsner Health embarked on an online review initiative to better establish its brand.
  "This initiative was really part of a bigger campaign to create more brand prominence, loyalty, and affinity with all of those we serve," Ms. Entwisle said. While Ochsner had started an online reputation management program in 2014, the organization realized it needed a more robust online presence.
  
  Ochsner started by creating a Google business listing for 13 of its urgent care locations, which quickly expanded to all 150 of its facilities. "We found that when people were searching 'urgent care' we weren't always surfacing," Ms. Entwisle said. "We realized that was because not all of our urgent cares had reviews." After piloting a review request program, Ochsner saw a 400 percent increase in positive reviews. Ochsner made the decision to expand its review request program system wide.

Five ways to create a review-based culture.
Based on Ochsner's experience and Podium's expertise, Ms. Pinaud and Ms. Entwisle offered the following pro tips for successfully creating a review-based culture:

1. Establish expectations.
   "The first step is always to get executive buy-in," Ms. Entwisle said. The expectation was that a patient would be asked to leave a review after every contact. The second step is to work with providers who may be apprehensive about potential negative reviews. "I think they become a little more self-conscious about the way they act and their bedside manner," she added. "Finally, it's essential to set expectations with the administrative staff because they will be the ones doing the service recovery [after a negative review]."
   
   
2. Set clear goals.
   Ms. Pinaud emphasized setting and communicating clear goals. "Without clear goals, your focus on reviews will fall flat," she said. Ms. Entwisle agreed: "Our marketing and communications goals focused on patient acquisition and retention, employee and patient experience and improving our brand prominence and affinity."
   
   
3. Incentivize success.
   According to Ms. Pinaud, most businesses believe that incentivizing employees has a positive impact on the number of reviews collected. Although it's important to customize incentives to the practice and its employees, some common incentives include a monthly bonus, a leaderboard that showcases top performers, monthly raffles for all who help patients submit reviews, gift cards or discounts, and days off. A tip is to get creative with competitions and rewards for reviews.
   
   
4. Share wins and correct failures.
   Ochsner regularly receives an overwhelming number of positive reviews. "It's important to publicly shout out wins with your staff and employees," Ms. Entwisle said. She also shared that her organization uses negative reviews to recover patients and improve service. "In 2021, we had 331 negative reviews that were escalated and were able to recover 126 of those patients," she said. "Then, during COVID, we noticed a trend in our Baton Rouge region around wait time. When we dug into this issue, we realized our Baton Rouge team was using the wrong type of thermometers on people coming through our drive thru. We were able to identify that issue and bring it to that facility's attention for resolution."
   
   
5. Track results.
   "Obviously, if you fail to track your results, you can't see if you've met your goals," Ms. Pinaud said. Ochsner publishes an online reputation management impact report on a quarterly and annual basis. "We have been able to use results to discover new things we want to look into," Ms. Entwisle said. "For instance, we'll do targeted surveys for particular providers or create new programs around branding and wayfinding. We're using our results to create new goals."

By using tools like Podium, healthcare practices can create and facilitate a successful online review program and collect comprehensive data that can turn into actionable insights.

To learn more about Becker's virtual events, click here