Practice Management Alert

Hint: Documentation and data can illuminate weak points.

Medical practices may not always think about customer service as a cornerstone of their daily endeavors. But in the United States, where healthcare is a business, making sure customers — patients — are satisfied with the services they receive is paramount to success.

Using quality improvement (QI) principles to evaluate customer service can provide a useful framework. Identify strengths and weaknesses by collecting some hard data on how patients feel about their experiences at your practice via patient satisfaction surveys, and incorporate additio nal QI tips to help patients feel good about your services.

Know How a Survey Can Help

Asking patients about their experiences can help you understand if there are any aspects of your practices’ services you might consider improving.

For example, most patients expect to spend at least some time in a doctor’s waiting room before an appointment. But practices that struggle to get patients into exam rooms or with a clinician in a reasonable amount of time may inadvertently encourage their patients to seek services elsewhere.

Of course, each individual may have a different threshold for what constitutes too long of a wait, but surveying a critical mass of patients can provide the answers you need.

“You don’t have to have a 10-page survey. You don’t need to have a one-page survey. You don’t need to have even three questions!” said Sheila Sampath, BBA, MHSA, CPB, associate professor and faculty chair, Healthcare Administration, DeVry University, in her presentation “The Art of Practice Management” at AAPC’s 2023 HEALTHCON.

You can have just a one-question survey, at the front desk, and when you sign patients out, keep a spreadsheet open and ask “How did today go?” and write down the answer, Sampath said. And if you ask a different question every month, you’ll have 12 surveys in a year.

Don’t just conduct a survey, even if it’s brief and informal, without utilizing the data. If you know your wait times are tough, ask patients how they feel about it.

“Get the data,” Sampath said. Then get staff together or bring in other professionals to help you figure out where to make changes to help get your wait times down.

Sampath mentioned how universities regularly collect feedback from students via course evaluations and pulse surveys. Collecting the data is not enough, she said — delving into the responses, identifying themes, and then reporting any patterns or conclusions back to the audience is crucial to helping people feel heard.

“Put it in a newsletter, change something and say, ‘OK, we’re changing this and seeing how it works,’” she said.

Create a Comfortable Culture

Most practices are familiar with the phrase “patient-centered care” and aim to provide services that meet patients’ needs. But it can be easy to get bogged down in the minute-to-minute and day-to-day monotony of seeing patients and forget that patients are people and have needs beyond their medical conditions.

“Why are we not talking? We’re just getting patients in and out,” Sampath said. “When I go to any medical office and they take the time to ask, ‘How are you doing,’ I actually answer the question to see if they’re listening.”

Sampath recommended cultivating a practice culture where staff feel like family to one another and patients are treated as if they’re visitors to the family’s home. She didn’t recommend getting comfy-cozy, like urging folks to kick off their shoes when they walk in, but emphasized the significance of listening.

If a patient shows up late and said the traffic was bad, meeting their gaze and acknowledging the frustration of traffic can go a long way in helping them relax — and a relaxed person will probably have a better, calmer experience at your practice than a harried person.

Bring Continuing Education to Communication

Technology and isolation have eroded in-person communication or at least ratcheted up the potential for anxiety for many people in many situations. If a group of colleagues go out to lunch (or meet in a business’s cafeteria), there’s usually at least one person with a phone in their hand.

Sampath recommended role playing as a way to help team members develop or exercise their communication skills, as well as their bedside manner. Everyone in your practice should be able to feel comfortable when interacting with other people, whether they’re scheduling patients, answering phones, taking patient vitals, or delivering a diagnosis.

While staff members, especially clinicians, may not want to make the time to role play such basic interactions, even acknowledging the significance of communications skills and bedside manner can help staff think about the ways in which they speak, listen, and connect with patients.