Avoiding poor online rating of your hospital

Word of mouth (WoM) publicity has always been amongst the most dominant factor that affect brand image and business of a hospital. With online medium becoming highly popular, the WoM now spreads rapidly and to a much wider audience. Hospitals, today must take their customers’ online reviews very seriously, if they have to successfully compete in business. Like most other business, in healthcare also patients’ decision to select a hospital are heavily influenced by the hospital’s online rating and reviews. Researches have also found that negative reviews have a higher effect on customer’s decision compared to positive reviews. Hence, it is of utmost important to prevent getting negative reviews of your hospital on internet for everyone to see.

What leads customers to give poor online rating of hospital:

While there could be several things that can upset a hospital’s customer, there are few which goes beyond their tolerance level and can become a reason for them to rate the hospital poorly. I evaluated about 700 negative online reviews of 28 different hospitals to identify those reasons. Based on my research I am stating the top 5 reasons for poor online rating and what should be done to prevent them.

1.   Poor treatment outcome – 

Treatment is the core purpose for which patient comes to hospital and if they don’t see outcome as expected, it highly dissatisfies them. These customers feeds the largest number of poor rating and negative reviews. Most of them hold doctor/hospital responsible for this and may often raise question on competency and effectiveness of doctor and hospital

Prevention – Explain clearly the expected outcome from the treatment and make sure that patient and his/her family understand it. Status of patients’ condition should be timely given to the family members. In some instances, where good outcome was expected, but not achieved, it should be sensitively explained to them with an apology.

2.  Death of the patient –

Deaths is a part and parcel of hospital, especially those dealing with critical patients. However, existing reviews suggest that relatives of patient who died in hospital are highly critical and often write the worst reviews for hospitals. Many of them go to the extent of blaming the hospital/doctor for the death of their beloved patient.

Prevention – While doctors can’t prevent all death, it is important to be sensitive to the emotions of relatives whose patient is on the death bed. Hospitals must do everything possible to ensure that relatives are taken care of well, both physically and emotionally. Prior indication of likelihood of patients’ terminal condition must be sensitively given to the relatives.

3. Feeling of being financially exploited – 

This is yet another important cause for customers resorting to negative online publicity. Feeling of financially exploited is different from perception of a costly hospital, where in the latter case, most patients are tolerant and do not give negative rating. Customers usually feel exploited if doctor/staff emphasize on price and payment a lot more than care of patient and if they think that investigations or treatments were primarily given to inflate the bills. This factor is specially important in healthcare as probably many people do not see the act of making money out of their misery in good light.
Prevention - At the first hand hospital must have their pricing and billing policies thoughtfully developed keeping customer’s sensitivities in mind. It is also important to inform the patient/relative about the cost estimate and try to be within that limit. In case it is crossing the estimate a prompt information should be given.

4. Inappropriate behaviour of staff – 

Rudeness, apathy, negligent and similar other behaviour towards patient and/or family member upsets them greatly, leading to poor rating. While there used to be a level of tolerance amongst patients towards healthcare staff’s behaviour, provided they get good treatment, this is reducing. Now, most patient/family member takes an offence if they have not been treated appropriately. If the behaviour problem arises from doctor, it is even worst.

Prevention – Staff of hospitals including doctors should be sensitized towards the need of having a good behaviour towards patient/relatives. Those staff who are not so good in soft skills should preferably be avoided in roles that require direct contact with patients. Behaviour along with other soft skill should be made a regular topic of training and development plans.

5. Inefficiency of functioning– 

Long waiting time, frequent errors by staff, inadequacies in services, lack of management etc. are seen as inefficiencies by customers and adds on to their dissatisfaction. However, reviews suggest that while they find inefficiencies as irritating, they may still give a decent rating to hospital, if other factors, that is, treatment, behaviour and rational billing is proper. However, if inefficiencies of hospitals get clubbed with any of the other factors, it makes it very likely for customers to give least rating.

Prevention – Hospital functions are complex and managing them efficiently may be a tough task. This usually depends upon management capability and may take time to improve. However, hospitals must try to bring in efficiencies in those functions which directly involves patients. For example, processes like admission, discharge, billing, investigation, pharmacy etc. must be prioritized and ensured that patient do not have to struggle. Regular and timely provision of information to customers on their matters also significantly reduces the dissatisfaction from inefficiencies.

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