How To Get More (and Better) Patient Reviews

Amanda Henson, director of online reputation management, Kindred Healthcare

Where does patient experience begin and end? Think about it from your own perspective. Say you’ve had knee pain for a few weeks and it’s not going away. You go online and research possible causes. Based on your research, you decide to see an orthopedist for an evaluation. You start looking for a doctor near you who specializes in treating knee pain. You read the Google reviews and find a doctor who has the highest number of positive, recent reviews with comments from happy, satisfied patients. You call to schedule an appointment.

But what happens if you have a negative experience anywhere along the way? Maybe the office address is not up-to-date on Google, and you wind up at the wrong office. By the time you get to the right office, you’ve missed your appointment and have to reschedule. You write a scathing one-star review about your experience.

Kindred Healthcare had a problem a few years back. “When we got started with the reputation program in 2013, a lot of our locations had no reviews, or the ones that were out there were overwhelmingly negative. We knew that didn’t tell the story of the care we provide,” says Amanda Henson, director of online reputation management at Kindred.

Today Kindred has a very different story. It went from 900 reviews in 2013 and an average star rating of 2.5 to 35,000 reviews with an average star rating of 4.5.

Learn how Kindred did it: Online Reputation Management: A Virtuous Cycle Drives High Scores and Better Patient Experience at Kindred Healthcare

Best regards,
Matt Humphrey
President