Sunday, April 1, 2012

Doctor Reputation Management Increases Physician's Presence

By Ken Gregory


Every doctor should care about online doctor reputation management. As the internet becomes more pervasive, reputations are increasingly built and maintained online. Doctor reputation management is the process of keeping track of, addressing or mitigating SERPs (search engine result pages) and social media. Doctors are as visible as anyone on the Internet and the visibility is just going to increase. A particular expectation and responsibility is inherent in the role of a doctor. Although physicians aren't expected to be super-human, they are role models. With the proliferation of information on the Internet, driven heavily by blogs and more recently "social media", a physician's reputation can get enhanced and/or dinged in a nanosecond.

More and more patients are researching doctors online. Fellow physicians are doing the same. This affects primary care physicians just as much as specialists and surgeons. While employed physicians may think they are immune. Ignoring your internet reputation now is akin to college kids, thinking that the professional world is far off in the distance. It's your professional reputation and you owe it to yourself to manage and protect it.

There are two primary constituents that matter when it comes to a physician's reputation: colleagues and patients. In each case they care about different things, with one major area of overlap loosely categorized as competency. Patients obviously want to be treated and healed in the most effective manner possible. Colleagues want to associate with competent peers and collaborate in the treatment process with colleagues who will match their standards.

One's professional reputation was built through the combination of a number of things such as outcomes, collaboration/assistance, word-of-mouth based on people's experience or perception, research/publishing, teaching, speaking, community involvement including charitable contributions, and extracurricular activities. Interestingly, reputations are built the same way today. The difference is the velocity at which information spreads and the distances it travels. Outcomes are perhaps more widely known today with the ease at which data is accessed and passed along. When people Google your name, they take the results at face value and judge you on that information, even if it's untrue. In the experiences of medical professionals, most negative reviews start as a misunderstanding. Doctors need to follow-up with your patients through an email periodically. Proactively encourage patients to fill out testimonials and online forums. Remember that the steps to improving online physician reputation management starts in the office. Take the time to understand why a negative review is being written. Try to identify who wrote that. Don't forget your ancillary staff is a part of who you are as a doctor and will have more impact than you might think. Examine if you and your staff are being abrupt to patients. Think if different situations have been handled with better communication.

Doctor reputation management makes you look best online, fix your Google results, and improve your visibility. Its patented technology and patented proprietary strategies, created by world-class scientists, and engineers, can make good content rank highly in your results, eventually displacing the negative content and bumping it out of your top results.




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