Healthcare reviews are coming back big:

• In just one week’s time, reviews of healthcare systems and physicians on Google skyrocketed to 50% of their pre-COVID-19 levels.
• This is a dramatic jump. Just a week ago at this time, they had returned to only 4% of their pre-COVID-19 levels.

Now more than ever, healthcare systems and physicians need to monitor and respond to reviews.

A Dramatic Return

Over the past few months, we’ve been tracking the return of customer reviews on Google My Business (GMB) listings after Google suspended them from March 20 to April 9. Reviews have been returning at very uneven levels. For example, as of June, Google reviews for auto dealers were at 93% of pre-COVID-19 levels.

But as recently as early June, healthcare was lagging way behind all the other industries we were tracking based on our client work.

Yes, healthcare still lags behind everyone else. But levels are increasing full throttle!

Related: Learn the What, Why and How of Requesting Reviews from Patients

We See Volumes and Sentiment Improving for One Large Nonprofit

Now, let’s take a look at the numbers we are seeing for one of our clients, one of the largest nonprofit hospital systems in the United States:

• Reviews were coming back noticeably as of June 19 – only 26% of where they were for the month of March, but an undeniable uptick.
• Most of those June reviews are positive.

I expect those reviews to jump as the entire industry comes back.

Key Takeaways

• Healthcare systems need to monitor reviews closely – and respond to them. Your experience may differ from the 50% average, but you should expect to see an uptick, and possibly a rapidly increasing one.
• Be especially mindful of sentiment – in formal reviews, to be sure, but also in unstructured feedback such as comments made on social media. As you can see from a post that I wrote in May, patients are actively talking about healthcare systems on Twitter. At the time I wrote the post, sentiment was beginning to rebound.

We’re continuing to monitor traffic data for all our clients and reporting the results on our blog. Contact us to learn how we can manage your reputation online.

Keep Reading: 5 Steps to 5 Stars: How to Get Great Online Patient Reviews