Now more than ever, online reviews play a significant role in shaping public perception and influencing consumer decisions. This is true not only for restaurants, hotels, and retail stores but also for medical practices. In fact, almost three quarters (71%) of patients today use online reviews as their very first step when looking for a new doctor.
In an ideal world, we would all want to maintain a perfect 5-star average review rating - but the truth is that even the most well-run clinics will get a negative patient review every now and then.
So, then, it is imperative that doctors, MOAs, and clinic managers learn how to address negative feedback in a way that is polite, productive, and HIPAA compliant. When done correctly, responding to low-rated reviews can boost your clinic’s credibility, improve your workflows, and potentially even help regain the reviewer’s trust.
Read on to learn how to effectively deal with negative patient reviews, and how to maintain HIPAA/PIPEDA compliance while engaging with patients online.
A Word on HIPAA/PIPEDA Compliance
When responding to negative reviews, clinics must ensure that they do not expose a patient’s personal health information without prior consent from the patient.
Doing so could put your medical practice at risk of violating HIPAA (United States) or PIPEDA (Canada) regulations, which could lead to legal action being taken against your clinic.
To ensure that you are not in violation of HIPAA or PIPEDA regulations, here are a few rules of thumb to keep in mind when responding to negative patient reviews:
Keep Your Response Anonymous (Even if They Put Their Name in the Review!)
Make sure you respond to all feedback without actually acknowledging that the reviewers were patients. In other words, don’t put the reviewer’s name in your response, don’t reveal any personal information, and don’t discuss the purpose of their visit - even if they mention those things in their own review! Here are a few examples of what to do, and what not to do:
✅ ACCEPTABLE:
Thank you for leaving a review. We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused. Your feedback is valuable, and we will use it to streamline our form-filling processes moving forward.
❌ UNACCEPTABLE:
Dear Mr. Smith,
We are sorry to hear about your experience with Dr. Gonzalez when you came in for knee replacement surgery last Friday. We sent a follow-up email to the address on your Google profile, please take a look when you get the chance!
Take the Big Issues Offline
For bigger problems where you may actually need to discuss specifics with the patient, invite the reviewer to contact you via a HIPAA/PIPEDA compliant medium (for example, the clinic phone number) for a follow-up. Include any of the clinic’s relevant contact info in your reply. It should look something like this:
CLINIC:
Thank you for taking the time to review our clinic. Please call us at [clinic phone number] so that we can help resolve this issue.
Four Dos and Don’ts For Responding to Negative Patient Reviews
Do: Respond to the Review in a Timely Manner
Most patients who leave negative reviews have a legitimate reason for doing so. By choosing to ignore their concerns - or respond to them weeks or months later - you may be failing to help them address an easily-resolvable problem (which could even lead to an improved review score).
Plus, review aggregating platforms like Google and Yelp are public-facing, so if your clinic chooses to ignore a negative patient review, other potential visitors can see that you aren’t putting your patients first!
These two reasons illustrate why it’s so important to respond to negative feedback (and to do it quickly).
But how quickly do you actually need to respond? Well, in a recent survey on the impact of online reviews, over half of all respondents (53%) said that they expect businesses to respond to negative reviews within 7 days, and one-third said they expect a response in 3 days or less.
But for the best results, we recommend responding to reviews within the first 24-48 hours whenever possible.
Don’t: Take Negative Patient Reviews Personally
Let’s face it - receiving negative patient feedback is never easy. It can be hard to stomach criticism about you and your business without feeling personally attached to the issue.
However, no matter what is written, it’s important to take a step back and look at the review as objectively as possible. Remember that negative patient reviews are not a direct attack on your character or competence as a healthcare provider.
Instead, approach negative reviews with a constructive mindset. A one-star review is not a setback, but rather an opportunity for growth both as an individual and as a business.
So before you respond, take a moment to collect yourself. Sit back, take a breath, then begin searching for a productive solution to the issue. The last thing you want to do is get defensive and end up in a back-and-forth argument with a patient over the internet!
Check out the (fictional) example below for an idea of what not to do:
PATIENT:
★☆☆☆☆
Slowest clinic ever!! I had an appointment scheduled at 4:00 PM and the receptionists made me wait more than half an hour before I got to see my doctor. What a waste of time.
CLINIC:
Honestly shocked by your rude and unnecessary review. You clearly don’t understand how busy walk-in clinics can get. Waiting half an hour is typical. It’s so easy to leave a one star review and ignore all the hard work we put in!
As we can see here, the person representing the clinic took this one-star review personally. Even though the patient was quite rude in their initial review, the respondent should have ignored their tone entirely instead of responding in the same angry manner.
Think about it this way: other people are going to read your responses and see that you treat patients with hostility when they approach you with a complaint. Is that going to make them want to try out your clinic?
Instead, the respondent should only have addressed the specific “problem area” that led to the negative review (in this case, long wait times) while remaining professional and objective at all times. Here’s how we would have replied:
CLINIC:
Thank you for your feedback. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused. At times, unforeseen circumstances can arise which can cause delays in our schedule. However, we understand that this should not be an excuse for prolonged waiting times, and we are continuously working to improve our processes to minimize such delays in the future.
Sincerely,
[CLINIC]
Do: Personalize Your Responses (While Remaining HIPAA/PIPEDA Compliant)
Even though HIPAA/PIPEDA regulations prevent you from addressing patients by name or discussing their personal details, you should still make an effort to respond to negative patient reviews in varied and personalized ways.
This is because it’s painfully easy to tell when a clinic is using canned responses to reply to reviews from their patients. Auto-responders can give off the impression that the clinic doesn’t listen to feedback, or that they don’t really care about the well-being of their patients.
It’s also worth mentioning that a study by Mattila et. al. found that consumers who submitted negative feedback “did not perceive any significant difference” between receiving an automated reply and getting no reply at all. In turn, these canned responses can lead to “higher levels of negative emotions [and] lower levels of satisfaction” for your patients.
Read below to see the difference between personalized and canned responses when dealing negative patient reviews:
PATIENT:
★☆☆☆☆
I just left the doctor’s office in tears. Dr. Johnson was so cold and rude to me. She made me feel so unwelcome at this clinic.
CANNED RESPONSE:
Thanks for your feedback! Hang tight, we are working on a solution for you!
PERSONALIZED RESPONSE:
We are terribly sorry to hear about this. At [clinic name] we hold our staff to the highest standards of courtesy and professionalism. Please call us at [clinic phone number] so that we can discuss your experience in more detail and make sure this never happens again.
Don’t: Try to Delete or Hide Negative Reviews
At some point, you may get the urge to try to hide or remove negative patient reviews altogether. Avoid this at all costs!
While we already know an overly-negative average review score has the potential to hurt your business, research from Northwestern University suggests that a too-good-to-be-true review score might do the same.
According to the report, a consumer’s likelihood to purchase a product or service actually peaks “when the average star rating is between 4.2 and 4.5 stars and starts to drop as the star rating approaches a perfect 5”.
This is because negative reviews help to establish a clinic’s authenticity and trustworthiness. Patients understand that no clinic is 100% perfect for everyone, and they may even seek out negative reviews on purpose to help narrow down which medical practice is right for them.
Plus, if you try to remove the legitimate opinions of your patients, you may accidentally become the latest victim of the Streisand effect - a phenomenon in which the attempted censorship of information actually leads to an increased awareness of it. All in all, it’s not worth the trouble!
Conclusion
Receiving negative patient reviews is an unfortunate but inevitable part of running a medical practice.
Rather than ignoring negative feedback - or even worse, fighting back against it - the best course of action is to respond quickly in a calm, constructive manner. Doing so will demonstrate that your clinic cares about its patients, and is actively working to improve its services every day (all while remaining HIPAA/PIPEDA compliant).
The right response could be all it takes to convince prospective patients to try out your clinic, and you never know, you might even get some patients to bump up their reviews by a few stars!
Did you know? Review aggregators like Yelp and Google almost always have a negative reporting bias - angry patients are more likely to submit reviews than happy ones. This can skew your average review score down, even if your clinic serves hundreds of satisfied patients every week!
To get more positive reviews and balance out your score, sometimes all you need to do is ask.
With Cortico’s patient engagement platform, you can automatically collect feedback from patients about their overall clinic experience. If they leave a positive rating, Cortico redirects them to your clinic’s Google Business profile to leave a public 5-star review.
Try Cortico for yourself - schedule a 15-minute demo with our team today.
