Practice Management Alert

Expert: Free-flowing traffic patterns a must for waiting areas.

Every medical practice wants patients to feel as comfortable and relaxed as possible in its waiting area, right down to providing amenities that make the space more appealing if the patient ends up having to endure a wait.

If you overdo it with bells and whistles in your waiting area, however, you run some risks. First, you need to hit that sweet spot between too few and too many amenities for your patient population. Also, you cannot let anything in the waiting area impede a patient’s ability to move freely about the office.

Use this advice to find the spot where waiting area form and functionality overlap — and most benefit your patient population.

Go Wireless in Waiting Area, But With Caution

According to Maria V. Ciletti, RN, who works as a medical administrator in Niles, Ohio, and is also a member of the American Medical Writers Association, “having [free] Wi-Fi available in the waiting area is a given.” There’s more to offering free Wi-Fi than giving patients in the waiting area a passcode, however.

“Make sure your office server is on a secure service, and separate [from] your public Wi-Fi,” Ciletti says. This might cost more, but it’s vital to securing your patient’s protected health information (PHI) and other important practice data.

Consequences: Without securing your office server, you run the risk of a data breach that could violate the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). So for safety’s sake, fork over the cash to separate your free, patient-accessible Wi-Fi from the office server to prevent potential long-term headaches.

Most practices also provide a television and reading material to increase patient comfort, reports Catherine Brink, BS, CMM, CPC, CMSCS, CPOM, president of Healthcare Resource Management Inc. in Spring Lake, N.J.

While opinions vary greatly on whether or not to have a TV in the waiting area, you’ll need to follow certain rules of decorum if you do decide to put one in the space.

A TV can be engaging for patients, “and it helps put a noise barrier between the waiting area and the front desk. Just make sure the programming is appropriate for a public waiting area,” Ciletti explains.

In this power-hungry society, you should also try to provide a decent number of electrical outlets in the waiting area. Having plenty of plug-ins at the ready will sate all your patients with laptops, phones, and tablets that are low on juice.

Ensure Ease of Mobility in Waiting Area

Amenities are nice, but not at the expense of patient mobility. You’ve overdone it with amenities if patients have difficulty getting to and from the front desk and door. There are several design details you can use to your advantage to make sure that your patients can move freely in your waiting area.

“The waiting room should have free-flowing traffic,” confirms Brink. To facilitate this traffic pattern, Brink recommends placing chairs against walls, or chairs back-to-back in middle of room. Any arrangement is OK, as long as it does not disrupt the patient’s path to the front desk.

Ciletti also recommends that waiting room chairs are up against the walls, or in some other out-of-the way spot. Further, her practice places “end tables at the end of each row, so there is an open path from the chairs to the check-in desk.”

Also: Ciletti recommends that you make sure that the waiting area includes “a clear, wide path from the door to the check-in desk. The path needs to be wide [enough] to accommodate wheelchairs and scooters.”