Tackling Bad Press for Your Practice

As most professionals will tell you, success in the medical world, especially with your own practice is built on trust. You need to build trust with your patients, with your staff, even medical suppliers and other professionals that you may come into contact with. However, no business is completely immune to criticism. In some cases, you may get a bad online review, which can be a problem, considering that 88% of consumers trust online reviews as much as they do personal recommendations. In other cases, there may be a more serious piece of bad press, like a patient complaint that escalates or even an issue from your personal life that leaks into your professional one.

Remember, your medical practice website is meant to communicate with potential patients and customers, so you can also use it to try and get in front of bad press or simply offer a response. However, there is a right and a wrong way to do this. Let’s look into where you can start.

As a start, we should preface this by saying that if the bad press issue could potentially have legal repercussions, the last thing you want to do is use your website to put out a statement without the guidance of an attorney. This could potentially damage your case or alert people that there was an issue that they didn’t know about before. Transparency is a good thing, but not when it is overtly damaging. For smaller-scale issues, like a negative review on Yelp, you may have a little more wiggle room to work with.

First of all, when you see a negative review, you always want to keep a cool head. Remember, unlike someone who owns a restaurant, for example, you are responsible for maintaining privacy regarding medical issues, so simply responding on the platform isn’t the best idea. The best thing to do, if you choose to respond, is to do so privately. By reaching out on a personal level and showing compassion, it may be possible to convert an angry patient into a happy one.

As a final note, when it comes to bad press, any business owner—a doctor included—should try to take things in as a learning experience. Even if the patient’s anger is unfounded, what exactly led to the issue? Maybe your website gave one impression that wasn’t entirely correct?

Because of the nature of the medical field, any sort of bad press or reviews can be extremely damaging. However, like any other business, it’s very possible that acting improperly to try and stop the issue could just make things worse. As a result, you want to make sure that you have a pipeline on how to handle the bad press, as well as a website that is optimized to help address these issues when they arise, as well as deliver in other key marketing areas. The best way to do this is with the help of the professionals at Top Ranking Media. Schedule a complimentary analysis of your practice’s web presence and we can help you point out ways that you can improve.