Tips for Medical Providers — How to Respond to Online Posts

A medical provider must exercise caution when responding to a patient’s online review to ensure that their response does not violate HIPAA. Understand that a patient review does not authorize the provider to release any patient-specific information in response, even if the patient reveals detailed and specific information in their post. You must also avoid acknowledging that the individual has been your patient.

I recommend limiting administrative rights to your practice’s social media platforms to just a few trusted employees. In anticipation of reviews, I recommend that you proactively script responses to reviews that your practice is most likely to receive for your social media administrator to post.

Best Practices for Responding to Online Reviews:

• Keep your response simple and brief.
• Do not acknowledge that the individual was a patient.
• Do not comment specifically about the services you provided to the patient services.
• Thank the individual for the feedback (good or bad).
• When appropriate, focus on practice/facility policy.
• Suggest taking the conversation offline and to a private channel.
• Provide your contact information and invite the individual to contact you privately.
• Do not contact the individual directly by email or phone.
• You can communicate directly with the individual via the social medium where they posted their review (e.g., direct messaging on Yelp, etc.). That said, without a patient’s explicit permission, you cannot copy positive comments from Yelp or other sites and post them on your site as a testimonial.

Sample Responses:

• Consider ignoring the review. (I do not generally recommend this – you can always thank the individual for the feedback.)
• “It is our policy to provide the best care to patients. Thank you.”
• “Your feedback is extremely valuable to us.”
• “We aim to provide the highest quality patient care. We love to hear these positive experiences. Thanks for sharing this feedback with us!”
• “We are sorry about your experience with our organization. We are committed to providing the best patient care experience. Please feel free to contact us at ________________.”

If you would like more information about best practices for responding to online reviews, or if you would like me to review a response or a recent post please email me at orrumberg@woodlamping.com.