#1 Patient Complaint in Online Reviews
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Reviewing our database of patient reviews as well as 3rd party review sites that cover dentists, the #1 complaint (in volume) was that patient-reviewers felt they were being “upsold” an unnecessary procedure or product. Here’s the statistical breakdown in a sample of 1,278 reviews across 5 states and 7 NFL cities:
Percentage of Overall Patient Complaints of Dentists Online:
1.) Upsold procedure or product (42.4%)
2.) Doctor rudeness (15.2%)
3.) Staff rudeness or administrative errors (12.6%)
4.) Costs “too high” (9.3%)
5.) Not enough communication (9.2%)
6.) Suspected fake or overly vindictive reviews (7.1%)
7.) Facilities were not modern (2.3%)
8.) Other (1.9%)
On DoctorBase, we get quite a lot of reviews each day from patients both happy and disgruntled. Less than 15% of all the reviews are negative, but when they are, boy are some of them nasty. Unlike other doctor directories, our engineers alert our doctors whenever a negative response is posted about them, and we try and resolve it with both the patient reviewer and the doctor’s office – this way the doctor doesn’t need to “wrestle in the mud” and the patient gets a response (with DoctorBase as the intermediary) so that the patient gets “response satisfaction.”
Meanwhile your office gets a chance to avoid someone leaving a very angry – and very permanent – review on another website. I know it sounds like a pitch for our search engine, but we do believe that for the medical industry, this “Mediation Model” is the future. After all, my practice is not a restaurant – I can’t move down the block, change my name and menu – and be back in business. But at the end of the day, we also feel strongly that patients need a forum where they can expect to get some response, recognition, or satisfaction to their gripes – a place online where they can provide feedback and know they’re going to be listened to.
