Your practice is great. The services you provide are incredible and the patient experience you provide is like nothing else. You know these to be true, but are they known locally, nationally, or globally?
Sure, your regulars spread the word about your practice to their social circles. But can you provide any evidence about how great your practice is outside of what you and your brand ambassadors say?
That’s where patient testimonials come in. They’re proof to prospective clients that you’re as amazing as everyone says while keeping your regulars at ease.
Let’s say you’ve sourced a few reviews throughout your tenure as a medical professional. But how do you know if they’re any good?
Here are 5 patient testimonial examples from different healthcare organizations and why they’re so great.
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The Cleveland Clinic's Patient Stories
The Cleveland Clinic does an amazing job of showcasing its prestigious hospital with testimonials.
The hospital has an entire section within its website devoted to patient stories. The individuals within each story come from different backgrounds, genders, and races. Of course, most of them also have different reasons for coming to the hospital as well.
The number of stories, how accessible they are on the web, and how well-formatted the page is great. But what about the content within them? After all, that’s what matters most when it comes to patient testimonials.
That’s actually where they shine most. Instead of having thousands of the more common and generic two to three sentence reviews, The Cleveland Clinic turned them into heartfelt and detailed stories.
Each of the stories gives backgrounds on the patients involved including…
Who they are
Why they came to the hospital
Photos that help paint a picture
Direct quotes about treatment
Accurate but understandable details on the procedure
Instead of providing patient testimonials for the sake of it, they embraced the idea fully. They discovered unique success stories and provide a narrative.
This is an identical approach that successful corporations use but they refer them as case studies. Instead of a company increasing its revenue, it’s somoene whose life improved.
Dr. David Richardson's Modern Approach
As a smaller or local healthcare practice, you don’t have the same resources a massive hospital system has available to you. However, studies show that smaller practices provide a higher level of personalization and responsiveness to individual needs at a lower cost.
If you provide better care at a lower cost, that’s something you need to let prospective clients know while they’re researching where to go for an appointment.
But if these prospects haven’t ever heard from you and your website says something like, “Providing better care at lower costs than larger hospitals” are they going to believe you?
No. Of course, you’re going to say that on your company’s website.
So how do you get people to believe that statement? With testimonials from your most loyal clients because 73% of people say positive reviews make them trust local businesses more.
This brings us to our second example. Dr. David Richardson runs a small three doctor Ophthalmologist practice in California.
They may be small but they place a huge emphasis on sourcing patient testimonials and they’re everywhere. The organization has an entire section for them listed on their website’s main navigation bar.
Within that section, they have special call-outs devoted to the best testimonials they’ve received.
Outside of what the client gave, these call-outs also include include responses from Dr. Richardson. These add a nice personal touch that lets visitors know that he cares about everyone who comes to his office.
Another great aspect of their patient testimonials is what they provide in between their callouts. They make it easy to provide feedback by having pages on popular and specific review sites.
His clients can leave reviews on Yelp, Facebook, Google Reviews, Vitals, Healthgrades and even on the organization’s own website if they want privacy.
What his organization does is the best example of what to do as a small healthcare provider with limited resources. By making it easy for patients to give testimonials, they’ll naturally come.
Cherrywood Dental's Personal Touch
Writing with a pen and paper is becoming less popular every year due to technology. In fact, cursive hasn’t been a requirement in the U.S. education system since 2013.
But have you ever received a handwritten thank you note or letter recently? It adds a personal touch that technology simply can’t reproduce. That’s because it means the sender took the time to sit down, pick out their favorite pen, and pull out a sheet of nice paper and write you something.
Not to mention everyone has their own style of handwriting so you know the sender actually wrote it themselves. Cherrywood Dental understands this novelty, which is why the majority of their patient testimonials are handwritten by their clients.
Each of these notes gets scanned and uploaded to a section within their website. It’s a nice touch that makes a big difference to online visitors.
However, the only problem to keep in mind with anything handwritten is legibility. Unless you see a majority of older clients, the odds that they have legible handwriting is low. To combat this, provide a transcribed version of handwritten testimonials on your website as well.
New Jersey Plastic Surgery's Social Sharing
When you get a patient testimonial and publish it on your website, you’re not done. You’ll have to make them as easy to find as possible. Thus, your next step is to share them across your social media channels.
Of course, you don’t just want to share them as a screenshot. You need to keep certain design aspects in mind in order to have success. In other words, you should at least create a templated image for your social media testimonial posts.
This is something New Jersey Plastic Surgery does very well.
What’s great about their example beyond what’s said from their clients is that it’s well designed.
First, It’s simple while using a legible font.
Second, each one they share gives tells the reader where it came from. This not only helps reinforce that it’s a trustworthy review to the reader, but it also indirectly encourages them to use that service after their experience.
Third, they provide their logo and a CTA within the image. Both of these aren’t necessary but they help build brand awareness with users who come across this image on the social web.
Hospital Sharjah Doctor Profiles
While you’re deciding who to ask for a testimonial, where they should go on your website and what they should look like for social media posts you’ll find yourself looking at what others do within your industry. You don’t have to stay within the bounds of healthcare organizations within the United States.
Hospital Sharjah is a hospital located in the United Arab Emirates that uses patient testimonials in an interesting way.
Essentially, they design doctor profile cards based on a patient testimonial they’ve received. These are well-designed while helping the people identify the doctors before they come in for a visit.
These may also help motivate doctors within your practice as it could turn into a competition to see who gets the most. They’re also easy to transfer over into a social media post since they’re already images.
Conclusion
If you’re just now starting to source patient testimonials, it’s hard to figure out where to start. In some cases, you may even have to prompt your clients by asking them a question. You don’t want to waste their time by coming unprepared but you want to make sure that you’re getting a great review.
Although there are thousands of healthcare organizations out there who provide reviews on their website, they’re not always great.
Hopefully, the examples within this blog post will help you build trust with your prospective patient in order to get more of them to step foot inside your waiting room.
