Doctors miss out on patients due to poor online profiles
Consultants are missing out on getting new patients because they have not kept their profiles up to date on the Private Healthcare Information Network (PHIN) website.
Independent hospitals are also missing out on new business – for the same reason.
Now PHIN has issued a note to all hospitals and consultants offering treatment to private patients to strongly encourage them to complete their profiles on its website and keep them up to date.
These can include the basics of services offered as well as outcomes, contact details, photos and more, it said.
PHIN said: ‘From user feedback, we estimate that 97% of people visiting the PHIN website are patients. Many are very happy with the information provided, but when they are not, website visitors tell us that it is because the information about a hospital or consultant they wanted to look up was missing. This is the top area for improvement identified by patients.
‘Additionally, a more complete profile attracts more visitors to that page. This is both how PHIN’s website algorithms work and how website visitors behave – they are more attracted to a profile which has a photo and has more complete details about information that matters to them.
‘Google’s algorithms work in a similar way, preferencing quality and quantity of content as well as the number of page visits over web pages that appear less complete and are less visited. We can see that hospitals and consultants who have more complete profiles attract more page views.’