Case Study: Boosting Google Ratings and Staff Morale at Baptist Hospitals of Southeast Texas

Stephanie Harris is the VP of Marketing and Communications for Baptist Hospitals of Southeast Texas, a large regional hospital in Beaumont, Texas, that sees a high volume of patients.

As VP of Marketing and Communications, Stephanie leads the hospital’s efforts to ensure they maintain a positive image in the community and online, one that reflects the great patient care the staff provides.

Unfortunately, the hospital found itself dealing with negative online reviews, which were damaging its reputation. 

Patient Feedback Issues and Attempted Solutions

Despite receiving positive patient feedback in person and via personal letters, Baptist Hospitals wasn’t seeing those positive experiences translate to their Google star rating, which hovered around 2.5 with just over 400 reviews. The rating gave potential patients an inaccurate view of the facility, implying unresolved issues with operations and care quality.

To remedy this, Stephanie’s team started a grassroots effort to collect positive reviews from staff who’d had excellent experiences receiving hospital services. While they did see movement — the overall rating increased from 2.4 to 2.5 — it wasn’t quite the impact they were looking for.

At the time, the hospital’s Google reviews swung widely between all 5-star and all 1-star ratings. To address the 1-star reviews pulling their rating down, they contracted with a company to work on removing some of the 1-star ratings.

In healthcare, however, removing negative reviews is difficult. In order to remove a false or malicious review, you have to prove that it’s false. In the medical world, this would require disclosing protected patient information — which the hospital obviously couldn’t do. They were left back at square one. 

Why Simple Interact?

Stephanie knew that many patients were leaving the hospital with smiles on their faces and 5-star ratings in their hearts. She just needed a solution that made submitting those positive reviews simple and easy.

Through the hospital’s partnership with its parent company, Community Hospital Corporation, Stephanie discovered Simple Interact. 

Stephanie and her team decided to implement Simple Interact’s feedback collection tool, which automatically sends a survey to patients via SMS or email soon after their appointment. They set up the tool to route feedback to Google to increase the volume of reviews there and provide a more accurate online representation of the hospital.

Seeing Immediate Improvement

After Baptist Hospitals started using Simple Interact for patient feedback collection, they immediately noticed the following improvements:

Increased Google Rating

By making it easy for patients to leave reviews after their visits, Baptist Hospitals saw their average Google rating increase from 2.5 to 4.1 stars in just two months.

“The results have been phenomenal,” Stephanie says. “I couldn’t have imagined that in just over two months, we’d have gone from a 2.5 to a 4.1 and climbing.”

The hospital now has over 1,200 reviews. “All that happened was we took those patients that we knew were there, we knew they were happy, we knew they were having great outcomes, and we found an easier solution to get them to write a review.”

Stephanie also thinks so many positive reviews have had a snowball effect. She believes patients who see hundreds of 5-star reviews on a page feel more inclined to contribute and leave a positive review of their own.

Conversely, people seem less inclined to “bash” the hospital with unfounded negative reviews in the midst of so many positive stories. She’s noticed a significant decrease in negative reviews since working with Simple Interact. 

Boosted Staff Morale

On top of improving the hospital’s online reputation, the influx of positive reviews has had a surprising positive effect on the hospital’s staff. Many of the reviews go beyond just acknowledging frontline workers, like doctors and nurses, to praise oft-overlooked staff members like technicians, dietary staff, and cleaning professionals. 

“We’re taking those reviews and sending them to their directors to give shoutouts to our employees,” says Stephanie. “They feel more loved, appreciated, and recognized for the job well done that they’re doing every day.”

Moving Forward With Simple Interact

After seeing success with Simple Interact’s patient feedback collection solution, the hospital plans to implement the service for individual providers within the hospital group as well. Even though many of those providers already have ratings in the 3.8 to 4.5 range, Stephanie is confident the numbers will increase even more once they begin using Simple Interact. 

Beyond reviews, Stephanie and her team have discovered Simple Interact’s other front office automation services. She anticipates adding more of those tools to aid their outpatient provider offices in the future as well.

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