Hello and welcome back to this

special two-part episode of SurgiSnacks.

My name is Al Norweb.

I’m the Chief Growth Officer of Surgimate.

If you like to geek out about the business of

surgical practices, then you’ve come to the right place.

Here at SurgiSnacks, we try to tee up

short digestible ten-minute segments that hopefully have

some insights that are useful for your practice.

So tune in and listen up.

Today I am joined by my guest here,

Evan Steele, for a two-part series.

We’re going to continue our discussion around patient reviews

and how to manage that for your practice.

So, Evan, for those that didn’t have a chance to

listen to part one of this, can you give us

a quick re-intro about yourself and what rater8 does?

Sure.

rater8 is a healthcare reputation management company,

and we also have a very nice practice

improvement, patient satisfaction, and patient experience module that forms

the core of our software.

I was a practice administrator for nine years,

got into the software business, started a company

called SRS Health, which I ran for 15

years and then sold it in 2012.

And then I’ve been involved with rater8

as the founder and CEO since 2015.

Excellent.

Thank you for that.

And again, so excited to have you on.

I know you have a wealth of

knowledge in this space, and patient experience

and satisfaction is your bread and butter.

So I know you have a lot to share with our audience.

So if you joined last time, you know that

we read a couple of real reviews as a

way to kind of tee up our conversation.

So we’re going to continue that today.

I’ll start with one.

Here Evan. Quote:

This sounds like another classic case of miscommunication, which

is something we discussed about in the last episode,

how to manage that and the cost of that.

When you are working with your practices, what

steps do you think they can take to

remedy a negative review like this?

So I’m assuming this is a Google review

or on one of the online review sites.

So Google’s hard to affect any change.

Google is kind of like dealing with city hall.

They do have certain criteria where if

there’s slander or terrible language, horrible language,

you could have a review removed.

Otherwise, it’s very difficult.

One strategy is to go onto the Google

review itself and report it and have as

many people as you know, report it.

So sometimes that’ll elevate it in Google’s

algorithms or bring it to somebody’s attention.

The other way is to do better by the patient next time.

So if that patient comes back,

that patient sounds very upset.

But if you ask them to send a review request to

them the next time, it’ll go right to that same

review where they could edit and change that review.

So those are the only strategies to physically change the

review or delete it, but the best policy is just

don’t let that happen in the first place.

And like we talked about in the first

podcast, part one is to identify your areas where

you’re having these issues and implement processes and

procedures so that it just doesn’t happen again.

Yeah, just curious, because I’ve seen this in lots

of social media and consumer product areas where you

have somebody directly engaged with a negative reviewer.

Do you find that works in the practice setting?

Are there systems for doing that that are helpful?

Yeah, there’s a fine line here with HIPAA compliance.

So when you reply to a Google review, a lot of

practices use first name, like, hey, Al, sorry this happened.

That’s a little dicey.

We’ve spoken with a legal counsel 20 times about this.

We recommend not to, but certainly not

“Al Norweb – Please call us”, or something like that.

That’s not HIPAA-compliant.

It really isn’t.

But the best thing to do is just simply say

to the patient, I’m really sorry you had this issue.

Here’s my number, I’m the practice administrator.

Here’s my direct line, call me.

And it’s a numbers game.

So you’re hoping that one in two or one in three

will call you and you could enter into that service recovery.

And who knows, maybe the patient will feel better and

they’ll go and revise their review and fix it.

So just remember to maintain HIPAA compliance.

Just be very general.

Just say, Call me anytime, we’re sorry about

that experience, and then hope for the best,

hope that they’ll change that review.

I think that’s really well, it’s great guidance around the

compliance piece, but I think having a protocol in place

to actually directly interact with a patient, to give them

a pathway to reach back out, a lot of times

it’s just the sense of frustration they have with feeling

like they didn’t get their needs met.

But seeing that somebody cares on the other end

can make a huge difference in their experience.

And so that seems like a really practical approach.

And that’s just Google, right?

But if you do internal surveys, like our surveys have

a 26% response rate, so if you send out 100,000

of them a year, you get 26,000 responses.

So then we have low rating alerts that will go out.

If we detect the patient is unhappy.

We’ll send out an alert to a

practice administrator, whoever the marketing person is,

an office manager, or whoever the designated person is.

And then we hear stories.

This guy from Midlands Orthopedics, Ron Horzewski,

he told us a story once.

The patient checked out, got the survey on their

phone, they’re in the parking lot, they complain,

they get in their car, they click submit.

All of a sudden, like a minute or

two later, Ron gives them a call and

says, whoa, whoa, whoa, sorry, what happened?

And within three minutes, he spoke to the doctor and

got back to the patient, everything was resolved, whatever the

issue was, and that patient was so upset.

And now that the patient is home, they’re not going

to put a one-star review up online.

Everything’s been taken care of.

The patient is now a happy patient.

They turned them around.

So doing surveys in high volume and

responding and calling patients who are upset,

I think is a very important component.

It’s kind of nipping these issues in the bud. Yeah.

All right, well, tease up another nasty review.

I’ll read this one up, actually, this is related.

When we talked in the last session, some of

the common sources of bad reviews are, as we’ve mentioned,

wait time in the waiting room, mentioned bedside manner,

and we talked about communication breakdowns.

So here’s one on bedside manner.

It’s funny because speaking about the job

here, we all talk a lot about

patient satisfaction because it is, of course,

all about making the patient’s experience good.

But another really important piece of this that we

see a lot when we’re working with practices, these

reviews actually affect morale at the office, right?

I mean, you know this well.

You are a practice administrator.

We work in a passion industry.

People care about what they do.

They’re in healthcare because

they want to impact people.

And the job is not easy day to day.

And so when you pour everything out and

then wherever you are in the office, the

front desk, you’re doing financials and billing.

Of course, the doctors, the MAs, everybody.

When you see something like this, it hurts. Right?

So another way to look at this is

improving these reviews and improving the experiences is

also really important for managing office morale.

What do you think about that?

Yeah, it runs both ways, so we hear it all the time.

We have clients, who take their — a lot of

times, patients, when you ask them to rate their

check-in experience or just rate the check-in

person by name, patients will especially if the front

desk staff and checkout folks wear a name tag.

So Bob or Nancy, it gives a great check-in

experience so that the patient will put on the survey.

Nancy was great, Bob’s the best, and they

flag them, and the office administrator puts them

on the lunchroom wall for everyone to see.

So that’s great for morale.

It’s great for the employee to engage the

employee and give them kudos and recognition, and

it makes the employee just love working there.

Everybody loves to be recognized.

The flip side is if you’re working for a

practice, let’s say I’m a prospective employee, and it’s

a tight job market in the healthcare field, right?

All the private practices are

competing with the hospitals.

The hospitals offer more money and better benefits and if

I just googled the practice and I see 3.5 stars,

126 reviews, I’m like, do I want to work there? Right?

So it could even make it

harder to hire and retain employees.

Also, doctors, it’s so hard to attract doctors these

days, new doctors out of fellowship or residency.

But to the extent that every

doctor, they’re young, they’re coming out

of residency, they’re technically capable.

They’re going to look up, google the practice, and

if they see bad reviews versus 1500 reviews, 4.9

stars, they’re going to say, I don’t want to

work at a place where patients are unhappy.

So those optics are important, too.

Just attracting and retaining great physicians, it

suggests an undercurrent of problems, right?

Like an organization that has maybe bigger

issues, correct motivation, and time and studies of work.

One of the key things that also leads to satisfaction

for job and work is a sense of agency.

I work day to day and I can

actually influence the outcome of my work.

I’m not just subject to the

machine kind of bearing down on me.

And so that’s one of the things I

think we also really try to emphasize.

And I think you were kind of alluding to it.

It’s a virtuous cycle.

If you have tighter processes and you’re

running a tighter ship, you’re ending up

with better results for the patient.

And when you’re getting better results from the patients,

that’s supporting a staff that feels like they’re making

a difference and then that improves the process.

So one of the things that we really harp

on when we work with practices is how to

use a tool like Surgimate to help individuals

that are involved in these processes understand their day-to-day work and get better every day, right?

Having metrics, and having a clean set of tools

that helps them organize themselves and do their

job more effectively ultimately helps them feel better

and ultimately results in a better patient experience.

At the end of the, day, you know, like the

old IBMer said, this goes back decades.

James Harrington, I’m not going to read his

whole quote, but the shortened version is, “If

you can’t measure something, you can’t understand it.

If you can’t understand it, you can’t control it.

And if you can’t control it, you can’t improve it.”

Right.

So it’s all about measurement, right?

You want to measure and improve.

Otherwise, how are you going to improve if

you don’t know where the improvements are coming?

And if you’re not measuring you

don’t know where to focus first.

So it’s me.

I’m the bottom feeder, right?

What are the biggest problems we have?

Which office, which staff are

having the biggest problems?

Identify them and improve or leave and we’ll get

someone who’s going to do a better job, right,

so you have to measure to improve.

So we’re big fans of that and we

try to help our clients analyze their data

to find areas where they can improve.

Yeah, and I think there’s kindred spirits between our

organizations in that regard, helping provide more visibility to

management and to practices on what are things that

are working things that aren’t working so that they

can improve potentially broken processes.

One thing I’d love to add, we talk

about processes and whatnot, if you think about

it, everyone’s into digital marketing and online reputation

and ads and social media.

But to me, if you’re saying all these nice things

and you’re getting happy patients to post good reviews, it’s

a little bit like lipstick on a pig if you’re

not fixing the problems that are underlying your practice.

And to me, I’m an old-school guy, right?

The best and most strongest and most important part

of marketing, important marketing is word of mouth.

Happy patients will tell the world, right?

They’ll tell their friends, you got

to go see this practice.

You got to see this doctor go to this hospital.

So to the extent that they could

use the data to improve the patient

experience, that’s going to create really powerful

marketing, word-of-mouth marketing opportunities.

I love it.

Well, Evan, I think you know that we try

to keep these into sessions of about ten minutes,

no more, so our audience can listen to them

quickly and easily and make it accessible.

So I really want to thank you for

joining us for this two-part session.

If you missed the first one would welcome you

to kind of look in our logs on our

blog and on our website or on LinkedIn.

You can find the first part

of this series to listen in.

And I believe, Evan, together we’re going to

be hosting another webinar in a few weeks.

We’re actually going to be inviting some of

our mutual customers on and actually sharing some

of their experiences with bad reviews and patient

satisfaction issues and how they’ve been managing those.

So I’m really looking forward to that

discussion and talking with those clients.

So I guess to sign off, we typically

will snack on our snack of the day.

So we had Starburst and so signing

out here with our caloric intake.

Thanks again, Evan, and I look forward again soon.

Same here. Thanks, Al. Take care.