The Must-Have Tool for Patient and Reputation Management for Plastic Surgeons

Reputation management for plastic surgeons is a must-have in the modern era. As one survey revealed, your prospective patients are likely going to read ten reviews before they feel confident enough to contact your business. Given the fact this decision tends to heavily influence the likelihood of patients to go under the knife, you must become more proactive about addressing your online reputation. It’s a crucial part in understanding how to market an aesthetic practice and grow your patient base.

While in days gone by it would have been perfectly okay to focus more on the plastic surgery aspect of things, it’s a different age altogether. Some things simply don’t cut it anymore. To thrive, you have to be constantly poised to respond effectively to negative feedback whilst work on building patient trust.

It’s not a bed of roses of course, but, you can augment the online reputation management process by introducing a nifty tool. Here’s the overview of plastic surgery marketing strategies that work today and what you need to do it:

The Argument for a Cloud-Based System

Doctor-patient confidentiality is not something that should be taken lightly. Patients who come to your plastic surgery practice need to know that they can trust you with not just their personal information, but, also their lives. As such, any records you keep on your patients must be secure. 

While the naysayers will have you believe that paper records work better at maintaining confidentiality, it’s also worth noting that the world has gone digital and there currently exist fantastic and reputable cloud-based services that can one-up traditional record-keeping strategies. 

In addition to this, a cloud-based patient management system also allows you to:

• Work from anywhere in the world
• Avoid keeping confidential patient records at your premises
• Spread out the expenditure on IT services by paying a monthly premium
• Quickly access patient records without having to download or install anything
• Safely store encrypted patient data on a lossless medium

How CRM Enhances Reputation Management for Plastic Surgeons

Rightly so, healthcare is usually treated as a special area of human interest where the rules in effect are different. While this is the case, it’s not to say that there’s nothing the health industry can’t pick up from other industries.

When it comes to reputation management for plastic surgeons, the field of client relationship management (CRM) contains a lot of methods that can be carried over to your business. 

Ideally, you want the management solutions you embrace to have some aspects of CRM infused in them. This may include having an optimal means to monitor patients’ communication and keep tabs with their latest development in the clinic plus any underlying medical conditions.

With plastic surgery CRM tools typically grouped into three major categories, it wouldn’t hurt to gloss over the options at your disposal when considering cosmetic surgery reputation management.

1. Electronic Medical Records (EMR)

The software here is easily identifiable by these traits:

• You can create electronic prescriptions for your patients
• With EMR, you can easily schedule appointments on the patient portal
• You can swiftly share data gathered with other providers
• The system is robust enough to allow you to manage all your patients’ health records

2. Electronic Health Records (EHR)

This system has a couple of extra tools to make life a breeze. The options here are:

• You have the power to perform data analysis on a wide range of clinical criteria
• You can share healthcare data on several different patients with other providers
• The EHR system comes packaged with a pharmaceutical database like SNOMED CT, and ICD-10. This makes it possible to conduct a searchable diagnosis of patients’ afflictions

3. Practice Management Systems and Platforms

This system features both EMR and HER components and then some. The beauty of it is that you can manage patients as individual people, an attribute that bides well not just for clinical staff, but also for non-clinical staff.

With this system at your practice, you can confidently grow your patient engagement numbers since it facilitates the expansion of communication channels which leads to the forging of stronger relationships. Ultimately, the enhanced patient experience by marketing a plastic surgery practice is sure to serve as a great way for you to gain more referrals through word of mouth marketing.

Top Tips for Reputation Management for Plastic Surgeons

1. Monitor Your Patients

On the internet, you can track visitors via aesthetic marketing to your website to gain insights on the nature of prospective patients looking to make a booking. 

By implementing this proactive approach, you stand to benefit from:

• Gaining a better comprehension of what parts of the online booking process aren’t optimized
• The enhanced ability to evaluate how effective your website is when it comes to providing patients with information about your practice
• Greater exposure levels which enable you to learn the nature of patients who want your services

2. Review Customer Service Best Practices

The interactions you make with patients are going to make or break your practice. If you’re ambitious, you’ll want to ensure that your communication channels are open to all. 

Additional adjustments can also be made in how patients book their appointments. Possible avenues to review include:

• Call-back request options – this would encourage patients to leave their verified phone numbers for further clarification on their inquiries
• Online booking – you want patients to be able to book for specific doctors of their choosing, get to terms about certain procedures they’re aiming for, and get information about which facilities are nearest to them
• Live chat – here, you can either have human operators or an intuitive software platform

3. Gather Patient Data for Clinical and Business Reporting

Data collection should take center stage here because it will allow you to evaluate how you fair among both existing and prospective patients. 

You can use color-coded tags to capture important information and also enjoy the perks that come with it such as:

• Learn who your patients are and their pain points
• Narrow down your marketing efforts to attract these kinds of patients
• Gain an understanding of how plastic surgeons at your practice react to different issues
• Appreciate who are the best referral partners are in the market

4. Keep Your Patients Informed

A happy patient bodes well for your business. You can help patient’s visits to your practice pleasant by arming them with as much information as they can hold with every visit they make to your practice. 

To achieve this, you want to curate the patient experience by:

• Reminding the receptionist to reach out to patients by setting automated tasks
• Automating appointment confirmations and reminders through text and email
• Producing and sending online consultation links in a single click
• Disbursing documents, test results, and any other pertinent information immediately from the consultation screens

Here are more cosmetic surgery marketing ideas to help you achieve more patient engagement and loyalty!

Conclusion

Having a CRM will help you keep tabs on your staff’s follow-up activities with leads. This will allow you to conduct better reputation management and avoid losing leads that fall through the cracks. 

If you’re having trouble setting up a CRM solution for your practice, then, it’s wise to seek counsel from an aesthetic marketing consultant. With the help of an aesthetic consultant, you’ll be able to set up a contact database and contact fields. 

This will prove handy to you not just in reputation management for plastic surgeons but also in nurturing leads since you’ll be able to better understand the context in which prospective patients have interacted with your business.