 |
Medical Practices and Ambulatory Care:
Impact Patient Satisfaction and Achieve
the Quality Patient Experience
Why is creating a quality patient experience pivotal for medical practices and ambulatory care centers?
As margins shrink and costs outpace revenue, enhancing the patient experience is key to long-term success and profitability. Patient satisfaction plays an increasingly important role in the quest for accountability in healthcare—accountability to payers, purchasers, accrediting agencies, and even consumers themselves. Improving
patient satisfaction yields many benefits.
Practice leaders can engage their teams in making their services more impressively patient-centered:- By improving communication practices that shape the physician patient relationship and patient perceptions of the office staff, and
- By rethinking and enhancing access, technology, continuity and the office environment.
With thoughtful strategy, you can strengthen every factor affecting patient satisfaction.
Do a
walk-through of your services.
By engaging staff and patients in doing a walk-through of your services, you can identify service strengths and snags and identify opportunities for building on strengths and pursuing improvements.
Revisit the office environment.
The service environment needs to meet
five primary needs of patients
to be conducive to patient comfort and satisfaction. By engaging patients and staff in quick assessments (see
How Patient-Friendly Is Your Office Environment: This Checklist Will Tell You
), service leaders can identify simple improvements that enhance patient comfort and help patients feel respected. And there are
wonderful resources
for going the extra mile in catering to patients’ special needs.
Ensure Caring and Helpful Office Staff
Since members of your care team all play a part in the patient experience, the CAHPS Survey, the Press Ganey Survey, the MHQP and other patient satisfaction surveys include several questions about office staff performance. For your office team to have a consistently positive impact, they need to be efficient with your business practices and patient-centered -- helpful, responsive and caring in their interactions with patients and families.
By instituting
effective interview questions
that help you choose staff with excellent communication skills and a patient orientation in the first place, you avoid headaches down the road and make your commitment to patient-centered care and the quality patient experience immediately clear to new employees.
By strengthening “The Pillars of a Patient-Centered Staff,” you can ensure that your office staff members not only know the tasks of their jobs but also excel in their communications with patients and families.
Also, by instituting explicit behavioral performance expectations for staff (see "
House Rules
for The Quality Patient Experience”) and providing skill-building opportunities, your staff can significantly improve their interactions with patients and families. The result: You will strengthen the quality of the patient experience as well as patient loyalty and retention.
Wendy Leebov and Associates provides
powerful services to help medical practices and ambulatory care centers enhance staff communication skills
and support their consistent use in interactions with patients and families.
Strengthen the Physician Patient Relationship
Since the physician patient relationship is the factor most highly correlated with patient satisfaction, an investment of time and attention to strengthening this relationship pays off in more satisfied patients, loyalty and retention. Wendy Leebov and Associates offers
information
and
services to help physicians
strengthen this crucial relationship.
Check out Wendy Leebov’s books for proven ways to provide the quality patient experience in medical practices and ambulatory care:For information about services or to discuss your needs and challenges, call Wendy Leebov directly at 215-413-1969 or
contact us.
Return from Medical Practices and Ambulatory Care to Quality Patient Experience Home
|
|
|
