Good customer service helps practices succeed
Listening skills, accommodations please patients
Most physicians are courteous, making eye contact, answering questions, and tending to patients’ needs. But when it comes to physicians viewing patients as customers, many just do not see them that way, and it can pose problems.
Managed care has forever changed the way patients view their doctors and health care providers. But some physicians still cling to the old concept that swift diagnosis and treatment are all that matter.
"You don’t have to give bad service to give good care," explains Alfredo Czerwinski, MD, principal with Lawson & Associates health care consultants in Sacramento, CA. "On the contrary, good service and good care go hand in hand."
For a physician, good service may mean providing timely lab results. Follow-through counts with patients. "If you say, I’ll call you tonight with your test results,’ then do it," he says. "It’s worse to promise you’ll do it and not."
Good service also may involve some outreach to patients, such as sending reminder letters for cholesterol checks or mammograms.
But above all, physicians need to make patients feel they are listening, says Czerwinski, formerly senior vice president for clinical resources at Sutter Health, Sacramento, CA. That doesn’t necessarily mean spending more time with patients, he says. "A doctor who spends 15 minutes in the exam room but does all the talking is perceived less well than a doctor who made the patient feel they were listened to" even if that visit was shorter, he says.
The bottom line: "Behave in a way that makes patients feel heard and respected," he says.
Physicians in private practice or hospitals should even consider adapting some of the universal basics of customer service into their practice, he says. Namely, meet the customers’ needs. For example, patients may be having difficulty making appointments because the practice doesn’t offer any evening or weekend hours. Over time, some of those patients may drift to other practices that accommodate those needs.
Czerwinski suggests including an open-ended request for information in patient surveys to cover such issues, such as, "We would appreciate your suggestions on what we could do to improve our practice." Responses from patients are likely to vary widely. "I would guess there are big demographic and regional differences in what patients would like," says Czerwinski.
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