OB-GYN-L Messages for September, 2007: Re: 11 ways to keep patients satisfied

Re: 11 ways to keep patients satisfied

From: jmtd

jmtd1@yahoo.es

Fri Sep 28 04:36:28 2007

----- Mensaje original ---- De: "GIN11153@aol.com" <GIN11153@aol.com> Para: Multiple recipients of list OB-GYN-L <ob-gyn-l@dns.obgyn.net> Enviado: viernes, 28 de septiembre, 2007 11:12:10 Asunto: 11 ways to keep patients satisfied

Your front desk staff can make the patient experience positive, or turn them off. Here's how to make sure that all goes well.

Sep 21, 2007 By: John Egerton, MD Medical Economics Your front-desk staff is an extension of you and the environment you want to create for your patients. While your staff members may be bright and caring people, it's possible they have some unconscious habits that can undermine a patient's sense of satisfaction when they come in for a visit. I'm retired now, but when I was seeing patients every day, I had a list of 11 mini golden rules posted at several strategic points in our office. Here's that list, along with the reasons why we adopted each of the rules on it: 1) Greet each patient with a smile. Many years ago, we hired Sally (not her real name) as our receptionist. Although an efficient worker, she rarely smiled. Then one morning a patient named Barry, a big, cheerful man, invariably full of jokes, breezed into the office. Grimly preoccupied with sorting through some papers, Sally failed to acknowledge Barry's presence. After a few seconds, he banged his big hand on her desk and proclaimed loudly, "Wake up, young lady! Life's too short to look so miserable!" The incident became an item for discussion at our next practice meeting. Unlike the unflappably upbeat Barry, I pointed out, many patients came into our office feeling scared or sad. What better way to reassure them or put them at ease than a friendly greeting? And so rule No. 1 became official: immediately acknowledge each patient's presence with a greeting and smile. 2) Treat each patient as the most important person in the room. This rule also came about as the result of a former receptionist's behavior. Because of either shyness or attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder, Janice found it difficult to make eye contact or to focus on most matters at hand. When patients arrived, she seemed to be unaware of them, turning, instead, to shuffle papers or to talk to another staffer. We alerted her to the problem and to the fact that arriving patients felt ignored. Janice resolved to do better‹and, in fact, did eventually improve. That, in turn, led to positive feedback from patients and a further boost in Janice's confidence and performance. It also led to our enshrining a new rule. 3) Avoid mentioning a patient's name and diagnosis in the same sentence. One of our nurses was caring and very competent but had an exceptionally loud voice. In the days before HIPAA, she'd routinely blurt out for all to hear sentences such as, "John Smith has prostatitis again" or "Helen Will has head lice." It wasn't easy to change her behavior, but change it did, and thus rule No. 3 was institutionalized in our office. 4) Stick to what you're qualified to do. Brenda was a middle-aged woman with grown children whom we'd hired to be our secretary. Although very good at her job, she had a distressing habit that we weren't immediately aware of: She gave unsolicited medical advice to patients. "Oh, you should take a couple of aspirins for that" or "I wouldn't worry about that pain‹it doesn't sound serious," she'd sometimes say to patients. Her problem came to light one day while I was seeing a 40-year-old male patient. "I've got this pain in my chest," he said to me. "But I guess I shouldn't be so worried about it. Brenda says it sounds like indigestion‹says I should take an antacid and get more exercise." The following week, this same patient underwent bypass surgery. Needless to say, we posted rule No. 4 immediately on our growing list of office dos and don'ts. 5) Don't criticize another doctor in front of a patient. One day, a new patient who was on medication prescribed by another doctor came into the office. Pam, a young medical student who was interning in our office, looked at the medication that he was taking and said, "I don't think Dr. Smith should have prescribed this for you. It's not what we do these days." Although I agreed with her assessment, I later explained to her that she shouldn't have been so openly critical of another physician. Not publicly, and certainly not in front of a patient. Pam listened attentively, but didn't immediately heed my advice. A day or so later, I overheard her publicly running down one of her faculty specialists, someone we'd worked very satisfactorily with over the years. At this point, I knew it was time to codify and enforce a new rule. 6) Don't let the telephone take over the office. Telephones can easily run our lives if we let them. We learned this lesson the hard way after much trial and error over the best way to route calls. In the end, we decided that it makes little sense to put a patient on hold for a long time while trying to route her incoming call to the right person. This practice ties up a telephone line, keeps the receptionist or operator from answering other calls, and irritates the person calling in. The better practice, we determined, is to obtain a callback number, promising to return the call in a timely manner. That way, we'd be in control of our telephone operation, rather than the other way around. 7) Don't chomp or munch in the presence of a patient. Mabel, our nurse, was a gum chewer‹not a discreet one, but a loud chomper who sounded like a fish flopping around in shallow water. Her colleague, Kate, our receptionist for a time, was a muncher. Sitting at the front desk, she'd typically have a bag of chips or cookies nearby, often greeting patients or answering the phone through a mouthful of snacks. No patient wants to be welcomed or attended to by a nurse in this manner. And so, our rule against eating, chomping, munching, or chewing in front of patients became enshrined, with no staff member to my knowledge suffering any permanent effects of malnutrition. 8) Don't argue with patients. Occasionally, patients would complain to our receptionist, Mary, that we'd kept them waiting this or that length of time for their scheduled appointment. Often, they'd exaggerate how long they'd been waiting. But instead of trying to calm them with an apology, Mary would dispute the actual amount of time that had passed, thereby risking still angrier patients. What we learned from Mary's way of dealing with disgruntled patients is this: Be apologetic, promising to do your best to remedy the situation or prevent it from happening the next time. 9) As much as possible, stay positive. This rule came about after I witnessed how differently two of our receptionists handled appointment requests. If our schedule was booked solid one day, receptionist A would invariably tell patients, "No, you can't see the doctor today." Receptionist B, taking a far more positive approach, would respond to the person at the other end with a helpful, "Sorry, we have nothing today, but I can offer you an appointment tomorrow afternoon." Although each receptionist let her caller know that today's schedule was booked, the second left her patient feeling less frustrated by the whole experience. 10) Be sensitive to patients' feelings. Sitting at the front desk, Belinda was usually kindhearted and jolly, but sometimes she didn't read patients' moods very well. "The old problem, again?" she'd ask as a clearly embarrassed patient signed in. Occasionally, it would be an exiting patient who became the victim of Belinda's insensitivity. "Going to live then?" she'd joke as someone who'd just been given the news that she had a terminal illness burst into tears. Belinda, of course, would apologize, but the damage had been done. 11) Always search for that something extra you can do. Charlotte was one of our billing clerks whose standard response to a difficult or problematic request was a shrug of her shoulders and a firm, "Can't do that." Not every request can be fulfilled, of course. But even a patient with an incurable disease can be offered comfort, support, and perhaps palliative care for her symptoms. To be told that there's nothing we can do for you is devastating for a sick person to hear‹and frustrating for the not-so-sick person to accept. In fact, there's always something that we as members of a practice can do to help, even if it's simply the promise to look into things more fully. There's nothing exotic or unusual about any of these rules. But sometimes it's still necessary to remind staffers. It's helpful if they remember the one golden rule that will make all the others a breeze to keep in mind: Treat every patient the way you'd want to be treated if the tables were reversed and you were the patient. The author is a retired family physician in Austin, TX.page.

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