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How to Improve Upon the Service You Provide Patients

Every medical practitioner faces the quandary of how to provide the best possible service to their patients. For your clinic to be a success, you have to be at the top of the league when it comes to patient care, and to do that, you need to shift your focus to improving efficiency, quality, and the doctor-patient relationship. You need to aim for low overheads and high technology which is supported by strong physician and patient relationships: it sounds ideal, doesn’t it? Here are some methods to help you reach your goal to have and provide the ideal medical practice

Evaluate

Before you make grand plans to overhaul your practice, you need to have a deep understanding of how it currently functions. You need to evaluate all aspects of how your business works, this includes everything from how the post is opened in the morning, to how you decide which courses your employees attend to further their knowledge. Think of it as an audit: understand the tasks that your employees undertake daily, and write a profile for each role. You may find that some tasks are being completed by over-qualified personnel, and so that task needs to be reassigned to somebody else. Equally, you may identify that a task needs to be assigned to a higher-ranking member of staff to assure quality, or perhaps even compliance to legislation.

Understanding the administrative processes of your practice will give you an insight into how to improve and develop them to reduce the risk of inaccuracies or duplication of information. Interview your administrative staff to help identify what they think needs to be done to improve the level of service they provide; it may be as simple as moving a printer nearer to the reception desk, or providing another water fountain in the waiting room. Feedback from staff is crucial for you to be able to consider what actions need to be undertaken to improve both efficiency and productivity. This is not merely a housekeeping exercise, but a call-to-action: you must implement the changes that are identified and within a timely manner.

  • Efficiency

By identifying practices that need to be improved upon you will improve the efficiency and workflow of your office, and that means you will, by default, improve workflow. Greater workflow will help you achieve lower overheads, meaning that the number of patients you need to see to cover overheads reduces, and your profit will increase. One way to do this is by reviewing the technologies and software that you use.

  • Access

Access refers to many things, and the software that you choose can either inhibit or assist access. Use technology to its full capabilities: think electronic health records, e-mail or live chat appointments, and internet scheduling for face-to-face appointments. Your primary concern is your patient’s well-being, and by adapting your working practices, you can devote more time to patient care.

  • Quality

Your staff need to be able to have any training needs met. By investing in your employees, you are increasing the quality of the care that your patients receive, and your staff will be able to feedback to you on the innovative new approaches and methods that they have learned about which will further boost your working practices. Think also about how you communicate with your patients. You need to address the issues that are important them, beyond the formal diagnosis; by looking at them holistically, you are already improving upon the relationship you have with them. Rather than asking simply ‘what is the matter’, reframe that to find out what matters to the patient: the difference is subtle, but the patient will benefit greatly. For example, patients with chronic illnesses may come to you for pain management, but may also benefit with guidance on how to cope with the mental aspect of living with a long-term illness.

How to Attract More Patients

With increased efficiency and productivity, you will be able to focus on gaining new patients, and there are several ways that you can do this, and with relative little expenditure requirements. Again, technology is the easiest way to attract new customers to your clinics. You will have a website, but have you used it to its full advantage? Not only is your website the tool through which your patients should be able to access and schedule appointment time, but it is the key to gaining more patients. It is a wise investment to hire specialists to review and update your website so that it can attract an audience, no matter what your niche or specialism is in, it can be marketed to your target audience.

For example, with new technologies and social attitudes towards oral hygiene, the world of dentistry has changed significantly over the past 50 years; diagnostic and preventative care is more prevalent now, rather than the reactive treatment of previous years. Dental marketing ideas can be enhanced towards appealing to patients seeking advice in these areas, rather than emergency treatments. The keywords that your potential patients use in internet searches will be used in the content of your site which increases your visibility. Click here to have this concept further explained by www.yeah-local.com; they will also show you how to increase your web visibility across different platforms such as social media.

Your website can also be a space for your patients to leave reviews about the care that they received, and will be an opportunity for you to showcase the skills and level of care that can be received from you and your team. Interacting with your patients on social media will allow you to become a central part of the online community, as well as your local one.

Another way that you can bring more patients through the door is by introducing a referral bonus program that incentivises patients to introduce their friends and family to you. The original referrer can be rewarded with a bonus for the introduction such as a discount, or even a voucher to a local restaurant.

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