Meet Balance Health
Balance Health is a comprehensive healthcare network dedicated to delivering exceptional care across a wide range of specialties. Serving patients in 7 states through 19 distinct brands, including over 230 skilled providers and more than 100 clinics, this network is driven by a mission of hospitality, compassion, and excellence.
The Problem
As Balance Health continued to grow and bring on new hires, they faced a significant challenge: helping new associates establish their schedules and build a patient base in an increasingly competitive market. Despite their expertise, many of these new providers struggled to achieve online visibility compared to their established counterparts. “We had a lot of new associates who needed help building their patient schedules,” said Denise Harshbarger, Director of Marketing at Balance Health. “We were working hard to build our reputation and our patient base, but we needed help.”
While some senior providers were skeptical that adopting an online reputation management solution would make a difference, Harshbarger and her marketing team pushed for the solution not only as a way to support the newer providers, but also as a time-saving investment. In addition to automated review solicitation, the right solution could significantly reduce the amount of time spent responding to patient reviews across Balance Health’s hundreds of online listings.
The Solution
In May 2022, Balance Health’s leadership team turned to rater8, a leader in healthcare reputation management, to address these challenges.
Before rater8, managing and responding to reviews across over 450 Google listings was an impractical and overwhelming task. “The time saving is immense,” said Harshbarger. “If we didn’t have rater8, it just wouldn’t be getting done because it takes too much manpower to do all of that manually. Having the rater8 dashboard pulling all our reviews into one place where I can filter for what needs a response is huge. It takes care of what probably would be several people’s full-time job.”
rater8’s review requests are sent directly to verified patients via text or email immediately after checkout through an API integration with Balance Health’s EMR. The real-time automation streamlines the review collection process and captures a wide range of patient feedback. The platform’s pollin8™ algorithm intelligently distributes patient reviews to the sites and listings that need the most attention, ensuring a polished and consistent online image across all healthcare review sites.
rater8’s patient satisfaction surveys also caught Harshbarger’s attention when she and her team were seeking a reputation management solution. She cites the micro-surveys as being “better and much more concise” than those of other solutions on the market. Like the patient reviews, satisfaction survey results are available in rater8’s centralized dashboard, which plays a key role when time is of the essence.
“The data is already processed for us,” Harshbarger said. “We don’t have to spend time creating pivot charts. We can just go to the dashboard and see everything clearly and easily.”
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Schedule DemoThe Results
While the brands in Balance Health’s network saw dramatic improvements across the board, one clinic in particular experienced significant changes.
Harshbarger recognized an opportunity to increase patient volume at a small, two-provider Balance Health clinic by introducing the benefits of rater8. “When I first talked to the more junior of the two providers about rater8, he was very excited,” she explained. “We added him to the platform in December, and his review volume started increasing significantly. His patient leads began improving as well. These were the leads I was focusing on — people who were actively seeking more information or calling directly from Google.” However, the more experienced provider’s listing remained stagnant, with no reviews.
By the end of January, the newer provider’s rapid success in local search results rankings had caught the attention of the more experienced provider. Looking to similarly boost his rankings, the provider asked Harshbarger for the secret behind his colleague’s success.
“I added him to rater8 that same day,” Harshbarger said. “From then on, I monitored his performance closely to ensure we were seeing results.”
Just a few months later, Harshbarger’s efforts began to pay off. The Google Analytics data showed a remarkable turnaround in the experienced provider’s search engine results page rankings. Today, both providers are ranking at the top of local search results.
“They switch back and forth,” Harshbarger explained, “but they’re both ranking and getting leads, and they’re both happy. What’s beautiful is that the experienced provider wasn’t the only one who saw increased leads from Google. Both of them did, and so did the clinic as a whole. The leads went up dramatically.”
“We have seen that if you’re continuously adding new reviews and responding to those reviews, you get more traction with the algorithms of the search engines. You’re pushed higher, and that means more leads coming in, more clicks, and more calls. And that’s what we need: to see more patients.”
And with more leads came greater patient volume for the newer associate. “The excess leads that the experienced provider couldn’t accommodate would then fall to the newer associate,” Harshbarger said. “So, his month-on-month patient volumes are continuing to increase.”
While experienced providers may assume they don’t need the same level of reputation management as a newer provider, their positive online presence helps bolster the visibility and credibility of the entire clinic. “It’s a symbiotic situation,” Harshbarger said. “It doesn’t really matter who they’re clicking or calling for, because there’s a doctor in our organization who can see them.”
Harshbarger confirmed that effectively managing online reviews through a reputation management solution leads to increased patient acquisition by improving search visibility and attracting new patients. “We have seen that if you’re continuously adding new reviews and responding to those reviews, you get more traction with the algorithms of the search engines. You’re pushed higher, and that means more leads coming in, more clicks, and more calls. And that’s what we need: to see more patients,” said Harshbarger. “It’s also about responding to changes that Google and other search engines put out there. They’re constantly changing. Currently, reviews are really, really powerful when it comes to winning Google and other search engines.”
As if boosting local search rankings and increasing patient volume wasn’t enough, Balance Health’s network of brands collectively saw a 230% boost in online patient reviews, with 93% of those reviews being 5 stars. This surge in positive feedback was instrumental in building the reputations of new associates and enhancing the overall online presence of the network’s clinics nationwide.
Through their partnership with rater8, Balance Health improved the online visibility of their providers and clinics, boosted their new patient volume, and set a solid foundation for growth across their network of brands. “My goal is to continue to add providers to rater8,” said Harshbarger. “Because there is power in the numbers. You can’t argue with numbers.”
