There have been a lot of things writing about the audacity of physicians making patients wait in a waiting room and how patients HATE having to wait for the doctor.
This article isn’t about that. There are definitely things you can do to fix that and make it better but at the end of the day, if you are giving your patients in the exam room good service, typically most of them are coming up with additional ailments while you are visiting with them that will take more time to resolve than was budgeted on the schedule.
But what you are doing that is hurting you is treating your patients like they are at the DMV. We stay on this side of the counter, you stay on that side of the counter. We’ll call you up when its your turn.
You can keep all your privacy policies and HIPPA regulations and still interject some personality into your office.
We call it the office concierge.
It might seem like a little difference. Why does it matter if your staff are behind the desk or in front of it. But it has to do with personal connection. Don’t make your office a sterile environment all about paperwork and diagnoses. Make it about connection and communication.
By placing our employee in charge of checking patients in on the waiting room side of the desk the patients have been giving us rave reviews.
For a week, every patient that came through the door was given a survey AFTER their visit as the very last thing before they left the office. One of the questions revolved around whether or not they liked or preferred the new office conceirge model or the regular way of checking in that they were used to in our office previously. One hundred percent of the 50–60 patients who participated in the survey preferred the new model. 100%!
Making these types of changes are the things you are going to need to do to garner more patients.
For more information, contact me at brock@waldocompany.com or check out our website waldocompany.com.