Thousands of healthcare providers trust PatientPop to manage each step of practice growth, from the moment patients find them online to post-visit feedback. Today, we hear from customer Mary Mead, Unified Premier Women’s Care practice manager.
Unified Premier Women’s Care is a four-provider practice in Marietta, GA, that cares for women from the time the first visit an OB-GYN through menopause and beyond. In this video, PatientPop representative Lisa Christy asks Mead about PatientPop Reputation Accelerator, a service that helps boost the quantity and quality of online reviews.
Watch the video for conversation highlights, or see more of their conversation in the below transcript.
Lisa Christy: Mary, thank you so much for joining me today. First, can you tell me about your role at the practice?
Mary Mead: I’m the practice manager, and that encompasses quite a lot.
I never know what my day is going to be like. I could be coming in for meetings with a vendor or working on stopping a toilet. People come to me if they have an issue, or if the doctors can’t get into their computer, or something’s going on with the system.
I streamline all issues. I’m doing everything. I like that because it’s never boring.
Christy: So you wear many, many hats?
Mead: Yes.
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Christy: How long have you been with the practice?
Mead: I’ve been with the practice about two and a half years. I had never been a practice manager before. I had worked in revenue cycle at a hospital, and I had done some other healthcare things over the years — about 23 years.
[This position] was different, and I thought, “I can do this; this is so great.” And I do love it. I get to do a lot of different things. And, you know, our doctors bring babies into the world, so we get a lot of perks.
Christy: When was the practice founded?
Mead: Around 1989. Dr. Street was right out of residency and was in practice with another doctor, who was getting ready to retire. (Dr. Street) is actually from Marietta, so she went to school at Emory and came back here to practice.
Christy: How many different providers are at the practice now?
Mead: We have four providers right now, and we’re going to be adding a fifth one next year.
Christy: Wow, that’s great. And how many office staff?
Mead: We have about 25 office staff. It takes a lot of people.
Christy: Can you tell me some of the services that the practice provides?
Mead: We provide care for OB patients all throughout their pregnancy. We also provide all kinds of Gyn care, so it could be birth control all the way through a hysterectomy.
The doctors do a lot of laparoscopic surgery at the hospital across the street, so they’re all certified in that area.
We also have a bone density scanner machine in the office, which we use for women over 50. So they don’t have to go to another place to get it. They can get it right here.
We also have a full-time sonographer, who does three or four ultrasounds a day. She does checks, of course, and she helps with guided IUD insertion.
We have childbirth classes here every month for our patients, taught by a woman who is an RN who’s been working with Dr. Street for 30 years.
We also have pelvic floor therapy sessions. We have a lady who comes in to do those every two weeks.
So we’re trying to help a woman in all aspects of her gynecological needs, whatever they may be.
Christy: Why did you begin to work with PatientPop?
Mead: [The practice] already had a website, but I was never totally thrilled with it. It never looked really professional, up-to-date, or user-friendly.
Look: 5 tips to get the most out of your medical website design
Also, I couldn’t figure out why we weren’t coming up in searches. I wanted to make sure we’re recognized when people are doing searches, because I noticed that, when I’ve searched for us, we didn’t come up right away.
I started to learn a lot more about SEO and learn from different people and just doing some research. Then I came across PatientPop. I knew they had worked with other athenahealth users and I said, “Well, maybe we can try them.” I started talking to (PatientPop) about some of the things we’re interested in doing.
Christy: You’re a new PatientPop customer, correct?
Mead: Yes, yes. We just went live a week ago.
Christy: You mentioned the practice previously had a website. Was the practice marketing itself in any other way?
Mead: We didn’t have a lot of marketing. We had an older website with really old information. It hadn’t really been updated over the years. It seemed very vanilla to me.
We didn’t have a Facebook page, so I created one and just started posting things. We do a ThermiVa treatment, which is a vaginal rejuvenation. So I was posting a lot of things out there about events and specials.
We needed to have a better marketing strategy, and maybe some branding and some cohesiveness to what our practice is all about.
Christy: Let’s talk about reviews.
Mead: When I first came on, I watched a seminar that talked about all the different review sites out there. And I know my daughters, who are in their 20s, write a review about everything, so I know reviews are really important; people look at those.
That’s what made me think that, “Oh, I need somebody to do that,” because there’s no way I have time to do that.
Christy: You took advantage of Reputation Accelerator, which uses a proven process to help PatientPop customers boost their number of online reviews in a short amount of time. What made you decide to take advantage of that service?
Mead: Oh gosh, it was a no-brainer! You want your practice to have the best reviews out there. People look at that stuff online.
Marietta is a transient area. People come in for work or whatever, and they may not go to church with someone who has a Gyn or an OB, so they’ll look online. If your reviews are bad, then they won’t choose you.
It’s just like a restaurant: you don’t go if the reviews are bad. So patients are looking for really good reviews. They want to hear what patients have to say.
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Christy: Some practices will find that the only patients who go online to write reviews are those who are really unsatisfied — all the reviews will be negative. Is that what you noticed for Unified Premier Women’s Care?
Mead: No, we didn’t have a lot of negative reviews… but I also didn’t know how many were really out there. It is a vast abyss. All I knew were the ones that I had seen and responded to on behalf of the doctors. I just wanted to make sure that we got the positive reviews out there for people to see.
Christy: So I took a look at your Practice Portal insights yesterday to see how the practice is performing. It looks like you have about 275 online reviews. It looks like many of those, a couple hundred, were just received in the last couple of months. What is that like?
Mead: It’s just amazing. We’ve never had an avenue to receive this kind of feedback before.
What’s also great is that we have this tool we can use to see our reviews right away. Previously we’d have to go to the actual review sites to see what people were saying.
It’s going to be great to take this information to meetings to show the doctors what’s going on, because we’ve never had a way to measure that before. I just love it.
Christy: Since you are a new customer, let’s also talk about your onboarding experience.
Mead: It was a great onboarding experience. Our Implementation Manager was wonderful. She really listened and took to heart what I was saying. She asked me questions about what was important to us. We talked about colors, types of pictures, whether they were soft or hard edges… very detailed things. Then PatientPop actually implemented those things in our website, instead of just giving us a cookie cutter model.
I just love the website and how it has all this great information for patients. It’s great to see the reviews on our website. I think it’s going to be a great tool.
Christy: You recently started working with your customer success manager and our Customer Success Team. How has your experience been so far?
Mead: Oh, it has been great. They’re all very professional, friendly, and knowledgeable. I couldn’t ask for a better team of people to work with.
I feel like we’re getting a great service for our money. My only concern is what we’re going to do with all the patient responses. We might need to get another doctor, but that’s a great problem to have.
Christy: You mentioned earlier that you would search for the practice online and could not find it. Again, you are a brand new customer, so we don’t expect you to be No. 1 in search results, but have you noticed that the new reviews and new website have helped you climb in search results?
Mead: We’ve gone up a few spots. That’s good, and hopefully that will continue.
Christy: What would you say has been the best part of PatientPop so far?
Mead: I think just seeing the quality of work, and seeing the work come to life. Everything that has been promised, (PatientPop) made it happen.
Read: The PatientPop provider promise
Christy: And what do you hope to receive from PatientPop in the future?
Mead: I really want to look at how we do our social media and how we can do blogs. I talked about that with my Customer Success Manager today. The doctors are busy; they don’t have the time to do it, but I know that stuff is important to people.
That and hearing from patients that they are able to find us easily when they do a search. That will be a reward.
Christy: Definitely. Thank you so much, Mary.
