Need of Online Presence

In the current era of digitalization where mobile phones are no longer used only for calling, your patients are using every possible online channel to find information about your practice. Earlier, healthcare practices used to get incoming calls or voicemails filled with questions about the practice. Now patients might have the same questions but now they seek their answers online. So your practice must have an online presence and all possible information about the practice that will answer all the questions. In this article, we discussed five online tactics to gain more patients.

Online Tactics to Gain More Patients

1. Share Practice Information

Patients are searching for information about you, but what will they find? You should already have the standard biography, resume, and photos of your providers on your practice’s website. Next, communicate the things that patients care about when looking for a physician. Clinical expertise and experience is only one part of what patients want to know before scheduling an appointment, they also want someone who is compassionate, is a good listener, and views the patient-physician relationship as a partnership. Patients does research about you, even though they are referred. As per the 2020 Patient Access Journey Report, 92 percent of patients said they always or sometimes did their own research to support a doctor’s referral recommendation.

2. Chose Right Online Platform

Everyone is a patient at some point, so where do you search for physicians? Google is currently the number one place patients look when searching for physicians. When asked which websites patients use for reading reviews of healthcare providers 72.9 percent of respondents said they use Google, per the PatientPop survey. The same survey research also highlighted Google reviews as the most popular source for physician reviews. So, make sure your Google profiles contain accurate information. Sometimes patients start their physician search on their insurance carrier’s website. This means your physician listing information needs to be accurate and complete on websites such as Healthgrades.com and Doctor.com. It’s very common for patients to decide against scheduling with a provider if they have inaccurate or incomplete listing information online.

3. Share In-Network Insurance Info

Clearly communicate which insurance your practice accepts. Don’t wait until a patient calls to find out your in-network status for various insurance carriers. Instead, make in-network information easily accessible on your website and other social media platform. According to a 2020 Scorpion survey, 33 percent patients asked whether the doctor accepts their insurance? 25 percent patients seek detailed information about the treatment the patient needs. Patients also searched for information like the type of physician they’re looking for, the practice’s geographic location; and symptoms.

4. Facilitate Online Reviews

The Software Advice survey highlighted that 71 percent of patients use online reviews as their first step in finding a new doctor. Patients in the Doctor.com survey ranked practice reviews as the most important factor in their doctor search, behind referrals. Even then, 92 percent of patients said they read online reviews about a provider they’d been referred to. Many doctors are apprehensive about utilizing online reviews because they’re worried about what bad reviews could do to their practice, but they are a critical part of the choice their potential patients make to use your practice’s services. The same survey also highlighted that only 1 percent of patients leave ‘very negative’ feedback on review sites. Not only you should you promote positive reviews, you should also respond to negative reviews. Knowing about and responding to negative reviews can give you the chance to improve, especially in matters that aren’t related to clinical care.

5. Check out Other Practices’ Profiles

Before you start building your online strategy, take a look at the profiles of your competitors. Whether it’s another orthopedic surgeon working in the same hospital as you, a competing doctor across town, or the nation’s best hospital system, see what they’re doing right and wrong on their profiles. Take note of their most popular posts, the frequency they’re updating their profiles with, and the type of content they share. The more information you can gather about what potential patients tend to engage with on the existing successful healthcare profiles, the better. After learning and understanding how your competitors make social media and healthcare work together, you’ll be able to model your own successful social media strategy.

Medical Billers and Coders (MBC) is a Leading Medical Billing company providing complete revenue cycle services. We shared this article on ‘top 5 online tactics to gain more patients’ for reference purposes only. As a leading medical billing company, we assist healthcare practices in gaining accurate insurance reimbursements for delivered services. If you are looking for any assistance in medical billing and coding for your practice, email us at: [email protected] or call us at: 888-357-3226.

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