The online reputation of healthcare professionals

According to a Bright Local study conducted in North America in 2013, when it comes to choosing a local business, doctors/dentists are the ones most affected by their reputation. In fact, we see that surgeons, doctors, anesthesiologists and dentists are the healthcare professionals most exposed to online reputation problems. As a result, more and more patients are researching the web before choosing their doctor, surgeon, etc. Managing your reputation online is a new reality that healthcare professionals absolutely must factor into their practice.

Before the explosion of Web 2.0, the reputation of healthcare professionals mainly relied on word of mouth or on surveys relayed by the media. Now, healthcare professionals must constantly monitor their online reputation. Not only because dissatisfied patients vent on forums, but also because malicious colleagues try to poach their patients using digital tricks.

Doctors, your online reputation is decided on forums!

It is patients who shape the reputation of their doctors. In France, this plays out on community sites, notably forums such as doctissimo, auféminin, or on blogs, and even on review sites such as test n trust or yelp. A quick look at medical forums shows that the names of doctors (and not only plastic surgeons) continue to circulate, in a more or less favorable light. Negative reviews or positive ones show up on Google. And this deeply affects the doctor’s reputation, and even their revenue. Some reviews from dissatisfied patients can lead to the outright destruction of a reputation built over decades. This is even more true for specialists, who have an even larger patient base but do not know them, because they are referred to them by their primary care physician.

Beyond the many forums dedicated to health, specialized sites have multiplied in recent years. Even if they don’t stay open very long in France, rating sites are very much in fashion. As a reminder, the controversy around the Note2be site, which allowed students to rate their teachers online, gave rise to the Notetobib.com site, created in 2008 to rate doctors, which closed after one month.

In the USA, the rating system is much more developed, notably with the site www.ratemds.com, where you can read very detailed, named reviews of doctors.

How much credit should you give to patient reviews?

On these sites and forums, patients take the opportunity to widely share their experience, positive or negative, and to let the community benefit from it. Of course, the credit to be given to these various evaluations of healthcare professionals on the web remains limited:

• First of all, because it is often the dissatisfied who speak up.

• Next, because the average internet user has neither the legitimacy nor the skills to properly evaluate a medical service.

• Finally, because there is a risk of abuse with certain practitioners who engage in self-promotion, thereby poaching patients from their colleagues.

The line between information and advertising is thin and open to interpretation.

Doctors, beware of online attacks!

Alongside the launch of professional websites and the explosion of specialized forums, many healthcare professionals have had to deal with attacks on the internet. These online attacks are essentially of two types:

• Spamindexing corresponds to attacks between “colleagues.” This technique consists of tricking search engines with hidden keywords in order to direct the internet user to a particular site.

• Attacks and the spreading of names on all kinds of forums, blogs and community sites. Those responsible are sometimes “real” patients, sometimes “fictitious” ones acting in a doctor’s interests.

What solutions are there?

To protect your reputation, you have to be proactive. It is now essential to have an internet monitoring system for the appearance of keywords, and in particular the healthcare professional’s name. The faster an attack is discovered, the quicker the response and the smaller the collateral damage.

What should you do when negative reviews emerge? Four options:

• Either eradicate the disputed content.
• Or increase your visibility in a positive way (without, however, breaching article R.4127-19 of the public health code, which categorically prohibits ; because healthcare professions belong to the regime of liberal professions, which are civil and not commercial in nature ; any advertising). Signing up on phone directories such as justacote.com, doctoralia.fr, allo-medecins.fr, nomao.com is one of the mandatory tools for increasing your visibility. Of course, this is not advertising.
• Or create content: This helps you become better known and often leads to more positive reviews. The goal is to highlight positive comments on specific keywords that correspond to the profession, but also to push negative comments beyond the first page of Google.
• Or respond to comments: This helps reassure people, but also shows that the doctor is present and attentive to their patients and future patients, even when it takes place online.

Good monitoring makes it possible to keep an online reputation intact — isn’t that essential for the smooth running of a practice?