Facebook is a platform designed around the user experience, and the ads shouldn’t be any different. According to an article on Search Engine Journal, here are 6 interesting hacks that will improve your Facebook ads:
Since 2016, Google has been leading the industry to get more websites covered by SSL and continually make changes to their Chrome browser that is one of the most popular browser being used. So, it makes sense to make sure all of our Digital Marketing clients are covered with encrypted websites using SSL Certificates.
Online reviews have redefined the way patients choose healthcare providers. Here’s a brief overview of this trend and how you can leverage it to get more patients for your healthcare practice.
Because reviews matter to patients: 84% of patients regularly consult review sites to view or post comments and ratings of healthcare staff (BrightLocal). Sites like Google and Facebook, along with medical review sites like Healthgrades and ZocDoc, have made it easier than ever for patients to post and share experiences. Patients don’t want to take any chances when it comes to their health. With such an overwhelming amount of information available at the tap of a button, they want sources they know they can trust. That’s why reviews have quickly become one of the most valued online resources for patients seeking the best care.
Today, the search for a doctor begins online, and reviews are often the first thing patients encounter.
Why?
Online reviews show up on page 1 of search results because they are full of fresh, unique content that search engines love. Practices with more reviews and higher ratings on a variety of sites have an incredible advantage when it comes to Google search.
To sum up: both customers and search engines value reviews for their authentic, unbiased information. In fact, patients place so much trust in reviews that to accelerate their search, they increasingly filter results to see only 4 and 5-star rated practices. If your practice doesn’t have enough positive reviews, it won’t even be considered as an option.
Bottom line: online reviews are the first impression patients get of your practice. It’s not only important to pay attention to what people are saying about your services online. In order to build the trust and credibility required to get new patients, you also need to regularly generate new reviews, interact with patient feedback, and leverage great testimonials for marketing purposes.
Want to know more? Check out our MCD Reviews.
The short answer is no, but wait! All hope is not lost.
Sites like Google, Facebook, Healthgrades and Yelp aim to deliver honest, unbiased reviews. Some sites have strict penalties for businesses that try to game the system either by writing fake reviews, offering incentives, or some other shady maneuver. Only reviews that explicitly violate the review site’s Terms & Conditions have a chance at being removed, but only by a site administrator.
The point is: an authentic Google business profile displays ALL opinions from ALL patients, not just the ones the business prefers. Therefore, your negative reviews are here to stay.
You can’t control what patients say, but you can control what you say. The right response could win back the patient’s loyalty or even get them to edit or delete their review. Even if the patient takes no further action, others reading the review will take note of your thoughtful response, minimizing the damage of the negative review.
Reviews piling up with no response tell patients your business couldn’t care less about them — you want to prove the opposite is true.
Tip 1: Have an internal process in place to deal with a negative review
“Thank you for your feedback. We promise to fix the problem internally and will contact you directly for resolution.”
Tip 2: Offer options to ease their concerns and show you care. For example:
Only after responding thoughtfully and providing a satisfactory solution should you consider asking the patient if they would remove their review (or update it to a positive one) — if they haven’t already done so on their own. Don’t push this, as it implies you only care about your brand image rather than your patients.
Patient voices are the most powerful form of advertising. Collect new reviews from your patients on a consistent basis and eventually the positives will outweigh the negatives. Automated software like MCD Reviews makes it incredibly easy to get hundreds of new reviews on third-party sites, then promote the best ones across the web.
Negative reviews are an inevitable part of running a business, but with a solid review management strategy in place, your patients will do your marketing for you.
Article credit to Birdeye Growth Hackers
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) today released the proposed 2018 Medicare Fee Schedule. As part of a statutory across-the-board reduction in payments, the rule proposes an overall 1% decrease to dermatology payments.
Within the proposed rule, CMS solicits ideas for making the health care delivery system less bureaucratic and complex for physicians, providers and patients. The American Academy of Dermatology Association (AADA) has already engaged with the Administration in this area, strongly advocating for relief for physicians, and appreciates that CMS has been responsive to our requests.
For example, the rule proposes that the current Physician Quality Reporting System (PQRS) program only require reporting of 6 measures down from the current program policy of 9 measures. CMS also proposes reducing the penalties for not meeting minimum quality reporting requirements under the value-based modifier, and not penalizing physician groups and solo practitioners who meet quality reporting requirements under quality-tiering for the last year of the program.
The 2018 proposed fee schedule includes a number of other important items for dermatology. CMS proposes:
The proposed rule does not include information regarding the new biopsy code values that were reviewed in 2017. Those are expected to be published in 2018.
AADA staff continues to analyze the rule, will be publishing other analyses, and plans to submit comments to CMS by September 11, 2017. Additional information on the 2018 proposed rule will be made available in Dermatology World Weekly and on www.aad.org.
For a fact sheet on the proposed rule, please visit: https://www.cms.gov/Newsroom/MediaReleaseDatabase/Fact-sheets/2017-Fact-Sheet-items/2017-07-13-2.html
Source: American Academy of Dermatology Association
As with the recent WannaCry Ransomware attack, organizations around the world have again been affected by a new ransomware variant known as the Petya cyber-attack.
MedCo Data customers using Sophos Endpoint Protection are protected against all known variants of this ransomware. We first issued protection on June 27th at 13:50 UTC and have provided several updates since then to provide further protection against possible future variants.
In addition, our customers using Sophos Intercept X were proactively protected with no data encrypted from the moment this new ransomware variant appeared.
Find out more about Intercept X and how it can protect your customers from ransomware like Petya and Wanna:
Please contact your MedCo Data Solutions Engineer if you have any questions. We will continue to update you as more information becomes available.
By now you’ve probably heard of the new nasty cyber-bug that is wreaking havoc across the globe. WannaCry slammed into the internet last week and continues to proliferate through under protected PCs and networks worldwide. This new tactic is not “phishing” related and we can’t blame our staff or each other for opening something we shouldn’t. Instead this one slipped out of NSA and is targeted at a known exploit in Microsoft’s operating systems.
Microsoft’s president, Brad Smith responded, “This attack provides yet another example of why the stockpiling of vulnerabilities by governments is such a problem”. No matter what side of the fence you stand on, the stark truth is we need to protect ourselves.
Behind the scenes MedCo Data has been running scans on all our clients to find anyone missing updates and pushing the needed patches to any weak points we find. Building layers of security and monitoring the integrity of our systems is the core of our strategy. Over the past couple of years you’ve seen more mass communications from me relating to ransomware than anything else. I don’t see this threat diminishing anytime soon. We must keep our defenses high.
Our entire team is standing guard. Please let us know if you need us.
Sincerely,
Dan Rodgers, CEO
MedCo Data
www.medcodata.com
813-321-1551
Why do healthcare providers need to pay attention to patient reviews? 77% of prospective patients use online reviews as the first step in choosing a physician. Reviews are the first impression patients get of your practice. Why patient reviews on review sites are important They contribute to a good online reputation Patients want a provider […]
Scientific market research really made a name for itself in the mid- 20th century, establishing many practices still in use today: questionnaires with non-leading questions, multiple-choice answers, anonymous respondents, all generating data used for extensive statistical analysis. With all the success large corporations and politicians have seen with market research over the years, most businesses implement these same practices without a second thought when trying to gauge customer satisfaction.
The trouble is, the advent of email and online survey platforms transformed the economics of patient questionnaires–it’s now cheap and practically instantaneous to ask your patients what they’re thinking. This means more surveys sent to each customer more often, which has led to ironic circumstances: the process of conducting customer satisfaction research often decreases customer satisfaction levels. But even this is difficult to determine since the percentage of survey respondents has dwindled to almost nothing: the average response rate for customer satisfaction surveys is about 10%. For patient surveys, this falls to lower than 10% on average.
Such a low average response rate means whatever results you are receiving are shaded by non-response bias: this refers to when the respondents’ opinions differ substantially from the non-respondents’. The lower the response rate, the higher the non-response bias. Of course, as a business, you want to know as much as you can about your patients. However, if your survey is too lengthy, patients won’t just get bored, they’ll assume that the survey was designed for corporate objectives rather than to improve their experience. Timing is another factor to consider: if you wait too long to send your survey, it won’t elicit a response relevant to the patient journey. It likely won’t elicit any response at all, as it interrupts the customer’s day-to-day life.
To measure customer satisfaction accurately, you’ll have to embrace Customer Journey Thinking. Start from scratch, taking these key points into consideration:
With these questions in mind, plan the structure of your survey. How can you avoid being lengthy and irrelevant? By being concise and in-the-moment.
Keep your surveys as short as Millennials’ attention spans. 1-2 question surveys sent at critical touch points during the patient journey not only increase response rate, but enable proactive service. Reaching out when the patient is still thinking about your practice gives you time to remediate any problems they’re having and salvage the experience.
Once you start stacking up responses, use them to their full potential. Analyze more than just your scores; examine the driving causes behind them to learn where operational improvements can be made. With the right approach, your surveys can help both you and your customers tremendously. Don’t diminish customer satisfaction by trying to measure it. Instead, use customer surveys to engage with, understand, and optimize the customer experience, consistently.
Many of our clients use Patient Surveys and get very important feedback, good and bad, that can help our clients make improvements where they need to be made. So, surveys do work, you just have to know your patients.
Adapted from BirdEye blog.