Wait time and hours you’re available. Quality Care. Personal attention. Communication. Follow-up care. They all contribute to your patient satisfaction, and that determines if a patient will return to your practice, or look for a better choice. So it’s important to focus on how to improve patient experience at every point in the process.
Today, patients expect more from their healthcare journey, from the moment they schedule a consult or walk into your office, to post-care follow-up. Enhancing the patient experience has become a necessity for your practice to survive and thrive.
Do you know how to improve patient experience?
A positive patient experience determines patient satisfaction, trust, and adherence to medical advice, while a negative experience can lead to dissatisfaction and loss of another patient.
Simple steps
Though the question is complex, many of the answers are simple and simply common sense.
- Reduce Wait Times: there’s not much that’s worse than a long wait time, especially when you’ve come to an “urgent” care practice
- Streamline checking: let patients know that they can fill out all that paperwork before they arrive. This will also minimize your administrative headaches on-site.
- Pleasant staff: choose staff who are naturally pleasant and compassionate, and then train them to reinforce these traits, and to better deal with the challenges that they’ll face when working with patients, day in and day out.
- Make your patients comfortable: clean, comfortable, and pleasant waiting area makes a big difference. Don’t forget to include reading materials, wifi, and a warm and calming interior design
- Communication is key: use every opportunity to communicate with patients starting with your promotional materials, an easy to use website, posters, brochures, signage, messages on hold, signage. And don’t forget your reception staff!
- Minimize paperwork with an efficient EHR system.
- Telemedicine: remind patients about the convenience of Telemedicine, especially before they come in. Tell them about the quality and convenience when they call your practice to let them avoid travel to your office.
- Followup: Make sure that patients understand instructions for follow-up care. Patients appreciate the personal touch of being contacted post visit to check on their progress.
Improving at every opportunity
None of these steps are complicated, and each is a “guerilla” tactic that can be implemented at little or no cost. Your practice can stand out simply by trying one or two. Both you and your patients will notice the difference.
