Background

In today’s digital world, patients use online reviews and star ratings to find the right surgeon and make informed decisions about their healthcare. Learn how Arkansas Surgical Hospital triples positive online review volume with Reputation.

• Arkansas Surgical Hospital is a physician-owned hospital specializing in joint replacement and spine surgery.
• Arkansas Surgical Hospital wanted to connect potential patients to excellent orthopedic surgeons and neurosurgeons at their facility.
• They knew online reviews played an important role in the patient’s decision process. However, they weren’t sure how they could manage the entire online reputation space.

“Online reputation management is one of the most impactful programs we are running in marketing — we now have a competitive advantage because we are able to ‘touch’ every patient who reviews us.”

~ Leslie Heizman, VP of Marketing and Business Development

The Challenge

When it comes to medical procedures, such as joint replacements and spine surgeries, some of the physician owners were concerned that soliciting reviews might also garner the occasional complaint.

Leslie Heizman, VP of Marketing and Business Development, knew that most patients were highly satisfied, but most of them would not go online and write a review. As a result, the lack of reviews did not reflect the high-quality patient experience delivered at Arkansas Surgical Hospital, which also made them less discoverable on search engines.

The Solution

Arkansas Surgical Hospital selected Reputation because the company offers an automated and HIPAA-compliant solution to generate patient reviews. Once they started using Reputation, Arkansas Surgical Hospital quickly grew the number of positive reviews on all the major and relevant review sites.

Inviting Patients to Write Reviews

Every month, Arkansas Surgical Hospital sends recently discharged patients, who shared their email addresses, an email to request a review. The hospital encourages all patients to leave candid reviews so that it can learn, grow and see trends and opportunities for improvement.

Arkansas Surgical Hospital chose to focus on a few review websites used by patients to research joint replacement or spine specialists, including Google and Healthgrades. Patients began sharing their experiences on those review sites. This helped Arkansas Surgical Hospital’s online reputation truly echo their actual patient satisfaction.

“People are smart; they know things are not perfect. So when there is an issue, we do not run from it. Instead, we publicly acknowledge the reviewer and work one-on-one with the patient to solve their problem.”

Monitoring Reviews on Third-party Websites

Through review alerts, the marketing team was able to get notifications and promptly respond to all new reviews. They worked with the surgeons and their chief clinical officer to develop the best possible response to the patient. Heizman values having a solution that she said “encourages transparency.”

Each time Arkansas Surgical Hospital answers a review, whether positive or negative. It’s an opportunity to engage patients in a two-way conversation. And by providing more content and information online, the hospital increases the odds to be discovered and selected by prospective patients.

Identify Trends to Make Operational Changes and Improve Employee Morale

Arkansas Surgical Hospital uses Reputation’s Thematic Analysis capability in order to glean operational insights from all of the reviews posted across the internet.

The marketing team was able to bring to light best practices from their fans. And develop educational materials guiding surgeons and staff to deliver the kind of high-quality healthcare experience that patients expect.

Using the Reputation Score to Track Progress

Through Reputation’s Reputation Score, Heizman and her team were able to easily understand how they could improve their online presence for the hospital and for each surgeon.

They first focused on making each surgeon’s profile consistent and accurate. Then they worked on increasing the number of online reviews — for each surgeon and for the hospital on all major review sites. The purpose was to increase search visibility, both in terms of coverage and rank.

Next, they tested different email templates in order to encourage their patients to write online reviews. And also to write their full experience in the review. This approach increased the volume of reviews. It also contributed to more concrete and informative reviews.

Results

• Within the first month, Arkansas Surgical Hospital grew its Reputation Score 5x — from 110 to 556, reaching a healthy and stable 668 after six months, blowing away the industry average score of 179.
• Within 10 months of using Reputation, they almost tripled the amount of average monthly positive reviews (4.9 to 22.5) — total average monthly review volume almost quadrupled.
• By taking control of the online review generation process, Arkansas Surgical Hospital was able to increase the average star rating to 4.2 for all surgeons and 4.7 for the hospital.

Arkansas Surgical Hospital saw its Reputation Score — a comprehensive online reputation benchmark — a 5x increase in one month from 110 to 556.