Why Public Image is Important for Doctors

Medical profession has grown immensely for the last few decades and come up leaps and bounds. Gone are those days when patients had to queue up and wait for long hours to get themselves medically checked. Now is the time when people have choices and lots of options. There are many medical specialities in which professionals make their careers. For every practice, there are several doctors available providing the same services at similar costs. For instance, you need to get your teeth checked and if you go through newspapers, yellow pages or the internet you can find hundreds of them offering dental health services in your locality. The primary point here is that over the years patients have increased many-fold and so as the competition among doctors. Doctors need to be smart thinkers, active entrepreneurs and acute strategists to withstand some of the tough nuts thrown at them by fellow counterparts. Focusing solely on the practice will not do in the 21^st Century. They need to be professional marketers and should know how to sell their services in order to achieve desired results.

Social Image or Public Image plays a conspicuous role in determining whether a doctor truly belongs to the medical area he is practising. Interestingly, in this neck-deep competitive environment, it’s the patients who decide the fate of a healthcare practitioner. Whether his endeavours (in this case the services) will bring a fruitful result depends on the quality and effectiveness of his services. This is the precise reason why most of the doctors are either getting themselves enrolled for social media profiles or creating some of their own and handling at the same time. The internet, here is the perfect platform for them to get identified, make a brand name of their practice. People these days are tech-savvy and believe that a doctor with good reputation and social media profile is better equipped to handle their medical concerns.

Foreseeing this as a regular trend in upcoming years, many companies are offering diligent reputation management services for doctors. And doctors are happily willing to oblige because they know the value of retaining a patient. These companies are making some serious bucks by providing what we can call as “the need of the hour for doctors.” Initially, only handful of companies was offering such kind of services and now even they are facing some serious rivalry.

Coming back to doctors’ reputation, it is imperative that they don’t overdo the reputation management stuff. There is a saying in English, “Excess of everything is bad” and that holds true for this also. Patients believe in a positive word of mouth. That is only achievable when a doctor provides quality healthcare services at an affordable price. You can say that medical profession nowadays isn’t restricted to just practice. Goodwill and how to maintain that goodwill are integral part of a healthcare professional’s success. It’s a slippery path filled with snow. A step away from caution can blow the whole practice!