Marketing and law: reviews must comply with legal standards

Patient reviews after medical procedures, visible on almost all websites, create value for the clinics that publish them.

Patient reviews after medical procedures, visible on almost all websites, create value for the clinics that publish them. However, lawyers warn that this is personal information, the publication of which requires the patients’ consent. If patients’ rights are violated, clinics face significant monetary fines.

Žygimantas Kvartūnas, marketing manager of the integrated marketing agency „Expertmedia“, says that customers, when choosing a clinic’s services, evaluate many factors – they take into account its tone of communication, image, values, environment, and reviews from existing customers. This makes it easier to decide whether it is worth purchasing the offered services and trusting the company.

In any case, when posting reviews, a balance should be maintained between constructive criticism and positivity. Ž. Kvartūnas emphasizes that the most important thing for a company is to highlight its strengths, so it is necessary to bring out more positive reviews. When a negative review is received, according to the marketing manager, it is important to react quickly and resolve the issue with the customer personally.

Publicly published reviews build customer trust and greater value for the company. This is important for image building and an evaluation of service quality that can attract more potential customers. Reviews are useful on all platforms, so they can be found both on specialized portals and on other channels.

A patient’s review of a service or company can be published publicly immediately. However, this
applies only in cases where the submitted review is abstract or anonymous, and one cannot detect a particular person’s writing style in it. Abstract reviews do not contain any specific information about a particular patient (for example, „great environment“, „doctors
communicate kindly“).

In all other cases, when a review is signed or linked to a specific person, before publication it is necessary to obtain the patient’s written consent. According to Naglis Narvidas, lawyer at the professional law firm „Cortex Legal“, a specific review with the writer’s name and surname is considered personal data (even health data), so consent is required for it. If the review does not include a name and surname, but from the writing it is possible to imply or identify a specific person, written consent is also required.

The patient’s written consent must comply with the requirements specified in the General Data Protection Regulations. When obtaining the patient’s consent, it is necessary to indicate the purpose of personal data processing and
the amount of data, the duration for which the patient’s review will be placed on the website,
contact details of the healthcare institution and of the institution’s data protection officer.

The patient must also be informed where exactly they will be able to see their review and must be
familiarized with the rules for processing personal data and with their right to withdraw consent at any time.
All this information, according to N. Narvidas, must be provided in writing.

If not all information is provided, it is considered that consent has been obtained from a not fully informed person
and accordingly the processing of their data is unlawful and invalid. Placing data without
a person’s consent is a violation of the General Data Protection Regulation, for which fines may have to be
paid.

Lawyer N. Narvidas has heard of cases of forged reviews. According to the specialist,
it is difficult to distinguish a real and a forged review on a website.

„However, this is not impossible. In some areas of commercial activity, state institutions have
managed to detect forged reviews. For example, after a more thorough investigation, the same
reviews can be recorded on different websites and thus a conclusion can be made that they are fake,“ –
says the interviewee.

Positive but fake patient reviews may be deemed misleading advertising. For this,
companies face a fine for violations of the Advertising Law. The size of these fines may exceed several
thousand euros.