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45K+ five-star reviews creates surge in web traffic, increases Google ranking

Leaders at LCMC Health wanted to take their organization into the digital age. They recognized the central role of the Internet in consumers’ search for care but were unsatisfied with the volume of visitors that LCMC Health’s website attracted.

To bolster their brand’s digital presence, and to earn trust from their patients, LCMC Health’s leaders decided to publish provider rankings on their website.

For this, they turned to NRC Health.

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INCREASED
5 STAR REVIEWS

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DOUBLED
WEB TRAFFIC

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PUSHED PROVIDERS TO
TOP 3 GOOGLE RANKING

Solution

NRC Health’s Reputation capabilities provide a comprehensive system for publishing ratings and reviews. The solution effortlessly captures, screens, and verifies 100% of patient comments.

By using a form of artificial intelligence called Natural Language Processing (NLP), the solution automatically filters out any libelous, fraudulent, or HIPAA-violating content. Once screened, the ratings appear on organization websites in the form of star reviews.

This process guarantees that only authentic and meaningful patient feedback appears on health-system websites—a reliable indicator of quality for consumers and leaders alike.

Moreover, NRC Health gives physicians and other providers a visible marker of their performance. At a glance, they can see the aggregated history of their patients’ reviews. This can be invaluable for efforts at improving their approach to care.

“We know that consumers start their healthcare search online. Partnering with NRC Health allowed us to harness the power of the patient feedback we were already collecting and share verified patient reviews on our own site, providing consumers with the information they most value and connecting them directly with our providers.”

Christine Albert, Senior Vice President of Marketing and Communications, LCMC Health

Results

Within six months of rollout, LCMC Health’s leaders began to see exactly the results they’d been hoping for.

SURGE IN WEB TRAFFIC
Because web-searchers are eager to see verified reviews, search engines tend to favor websites that host them. This was certainly the case at LCMC Health. Once reviews were published, the number of reviews enabled the number of providers in the top 3 position within Google rankings to increase from 7.4% to more than 21%—and the average monthly page views went from 11,664 page views to 22,052, almost doubling the number of views.

VALIDATION OF EXCELLENCE
Shortly after the rollout, LCMC Health’s providers received remarkable validation from their patients. The average provider rating on LCMC Health’s site is now 4.8 out of five stars, with 82% of reviews being five-star reviews.

A NEW CULTURE OF CARE
NRC Health’s solutions have also helped transform operations at LCMC Health’s hospitals. Every site of care now hosts monthly feedback meetings to review patient comments and look for opportunities to offer a better experience. Operational leaders are present at these meetings and available to address any facility or operational challenges that are mentioned in the patient feedback.

A RECRUITING ADVANTAGE
Nor has the impact at LCMC Health been limited to clinical care. Another facet of the organization—Physician Practices—has observed a marked improvement in the onboarding of new clinicians.

COMPLETE CLINICIAN BUY-IN
Initially, LCMC Health clinicians hesitated to embrace the ratings and reviews rollout. They worried about the public exposure, and about their performance as providers being graded unfairly by unsatisfied patients.

After more than a year, however, LCMC Health’s patients proved that these providers needn’t have been concerned. Since deployment, LCMC Health’s providers have received 57,991 reviews from patients—and only three of them have been disputed.

“LCMC Health is committed to transparency. We value the feedback that we receive through our patient satisfaction surveys and are proud to share that information.”

Dr. John Heaton, President of Clinical and System Operations, LCMC Health

57,991

LCMC Health’s reviews from patients

The Future

This is only the beginning at LCMC Health. The organization’s leaders have ambitious plans for its future. The organization hopes to implement the solutions across more service-lines, and to streamline results reporting across the system.

TAKEAWAY TIPS

To ensure the success of the rollout, LCMC Health’s leaders offer the following suggestions:

OVER-COMMUNICATE
Providers may resist the publication of patient ratings. This is a natural response: their reputations are at stake. To ease their trepidation, LCMC Health’s leaders adopted an extensive campaign of communication that lasted more than a year. The campaign included demonstrations of the platform, an internal NRC Health’s toolkit, email updates, and one-on-one conversations. The organization’s leaders feel that this campaign was essential to success at LCMC Health.

START WITH AN INTERNAL ROLLOUT
A further step to help providers acclimate to a ratings and reviews rollout: show it to them before showing to the world. LCMC Health’s team debuted NRC Health’s ratings display on a staging website, giving employees time to come to grips with how the system works. This allowed providers to get comfortable with how they’d be portrayed online.

FIND CHAMPIONS
Finally, if physicians are to have confidence in the solution, it’s important they hear about the benefits from their peers. LCMC Health recruited physician leaders at each of their hospitals to help clinicians fully integrate the solution into their work.

“As a physician, I understood the worries and concerns of my peers, but I also was aware that patients are choosing a provider based on the information online. Although it can be difficult to see a sometimes-negative review on my profile, it’s been overwhelmingly positive, and I’ve even had new patients come to me as a result of the reviews they’ve read.”

Dr. Christopher Lege, Internal Medicine Physician and Transparency Physician Champion, Touro


LEARN MORE

For more on NRC Health’s Human Understanding Program,
call 800.388.4264 or visit go.nrchealth.com/human-understanding-program.