If you are a healthcare organization, delete your Facebook Reviews Section.
It’s bad for business, and, whether or not it is legal, it’s certainly ethically dubious.
Healthcare visits can be intensely emotional, resulting in an binomial distribution of highly negative and highly positive reviews.
Put another way, people who take the time to post reviews are either very happy or very angry, and the angry people will post reviews, often BY NAME, which personally attack you organization’s employees/providers.
So, here are several points weighing in favor of deleting your Facebook Reviews section, (which may well be publishing libelous or abusive comments about your staff or providers at this minute):
- Having a Facebook Reviews section is not about “transparency”. Transparency should work both ways, but, due to HIPPA concerns, Facebook Reviews posts are really a one way street. You are not having an “open, transparent” discussion with a patient about their visit; instead, you are acting as a publishing platform to allow outliers to attack your staff and providers on a one way street.
- If transparency is a goal, and you want to more actively seek negative feedback, then request it directly – and offline – by more prominently asking for it on your homepage.
- Many very good healthcare organizations do not have a Facebook Reviews section, including the Mayo Clinic, Optum, United Health, and CVS Health. There’s a reason for that.
- It’s unlikely to be supportive of your mission, unless you mission is ‘free speech at all costs”. Remember, a physician whose reputation is getting destroyed online may become distracted, which could put their patents at risk, so if your mission has anything to do with health, best avoid it.
- There could be legal recourse by the employee against the healthcare organization ( also known as the publisher) – as an employer -for allowing these posts to remain published if they are untrue and damaging to the employee’s reputation. (Look, I am not a lawyer, but it may be worth running by legal department. Are you fully protected, like Facebook is, – as a publisher – against defamation by The Communications Decency Act? By choosing to keep derogatory posts published for all the world to see, could you be setting yourself up for a work place harassment charge? Let’s face it, you wouldn’t tolerate derogatory comments for single day inside the office, but here you are publishing them just two clicks away from your home page, 24/7, month after month, year after year. Hey, it may be legal, but is it ethical for you to give your patients a place to personally attack your providers and staff AND then publish this attack for all the world to see for years on end?
- There is an opportunity cost to dealing with these negative comments when they appear. For example, when an abusive comment gets posted, who usually gets involved? The provider, marketing, the provider’s supervisor, the medical director?
The argument, usually from Marketing, in favor of leaving the Facebook Reviews Section intact will be “we need to be transparent” or “they are going to post on Yelp anyway”, or “we really want to show our “strong average rating reviews number” .
Don’t get sucked in by these arguments. Remember, these theoretical marketing benefits are at the cost of potentially destroying your own employee’s reputation and career.
Please, take the high ethical ground and consider the human cost to the employee or provider.
It’s one thing for Yelp to publish an attack on your employees, it’s another thing for you, their employer (who should be standing up for their employees) – to do it.
Delete the Facebook Review section.