google reviews?

[randomdoc1]

So, I know good reviews help with SEO. Especially in psychiatry, over the course of a clinic's life or a psychiatrist's career, we are all bound to have our share of negative reviews. From what I gather from the review websites is that there is an over-representation of bad ones. Some legit, some from disgruntled people who really distort the whole story. Especially as I am starting my own practice, I am becoming more and more aware to watch out for what can taint the internet presence of both myself and the practice. I think one of the best solutions to possibly getting your internet presence tainted is to get good reviews and deliver good work. Any reasonable person will understand that there is always the occasional bad review. But the thing is, in many cases there is a silent majority of people who don't leave a review. I noticed there are services out here to help organically drive and enhance your review presence. They will do things like encourage your patients to leave reviews. Does anyone see an ethical dilemma or conflict of interest if I do this with my patients? I see many healthcare systems encouraging patients to leave reviews and that's how their doctors have hundreds of 5 star reviews and have a more accurate representation of an average of 4.5 star rating, 4 star rating, etc. Plenty of my patients are doing well and I'm sure would leave shining reviews if asked to leave an honest review. Just bracing my practice for when that one star review comes, and it will eventually. All my local clinics have a few and many of them I respect. Their average google star rating ranges anywhere from 1-3 stars out of 5 and I know it is biased.

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[birchswing]

To me it seems like people on Google Reviews use their real names, so (at least for me), if you wrote something negative you'd really want to be sure it was worth it (in my case I still wouldn't want to put my name out there even it was something egregious like a surgery error). But on Vitals, Healthgrades, RateMDs etc., people can be anonymous. I've noticed that reviews tend to be higher on WebMD.com than other places, not sure why. I kind of wonder whether WebMD is a listing service for doctors that takes payments in order for good listings and good reviews.

The big local healthcare conglomerate around here (I don't know the names for these things, the one that has all the big hospitals in my area) has its own ratings system where every doctor has a 5/5 rating and very glowing written reviews. I think they must be asking the question in a weird way because the reviews are so positive but sometimes seem oddly phrased, maybe like they were asked "What are the best qualities of this provider" or something like that. I find it really hard to believe that they're posting everyone's reviews to come up with a 5/5, plus the reviews must be by invitation only because I don't see a way to post one.

Online reviews are a big deal everywhere in terms of their reliability. Casper (the mattress company) sued a review company out of existence, then bought the review site, and continues to run it. Even Amazon which used to be pretty reliable has gotten sketchier with reviews.

Personally having worked in customer service, I despise the customer review process. The customers don't know it, but there's only one question that actually counts on the survey toward the employee's benefit, and there's only one acceptable answer (10/10 or 5/5). 9/10 or 4/5 means you're getting reprimanded and "coached." And oftentimes the customer didn't remember who it was they actually spoke to last, so they don't know whom they're actually reviewing.