Who are all those people in your waiting room?
Who are all those people in your waiting room?
Are your patients being ignored?
You may not think your practice’s waiting room would be a good place for a homeless person to camp out, but consider the appeal: The surroundings are comfortable. There’s usually a water cooler, a pot of coffee, or hot tea available. There are magazines to read. And best of all (from a homeless person’s standpoint), sometimes people can sit in a physician’s waiting room for hours without anybody even noticing them.
"Where else in American business can you spend an hour and be ignored? Unfortunately, that’s the way it is in most group practices," says Tom Aug of Development Partners, a Cincinnati firm that specializes in improving patient satisfaction for physician group practices.
Only 10% of patient visit is spent with doctor
Patient satisfaction experts report that a lengthy waiting time is a major source of patient complaints, and it’s no wonder. "Only about 10% of the whole patient experience is spent with the physician. Practices need to look at how they manage the other 90% of the time, " Aug points out.
"One of the biggest issues that comes up in our patient satisfaction survey is access. It comes down to delays in waits. Patients are frustrated when they face delays in getting access to the kind of care providers are trained to provide," notes Cleveland Davis, physician service specialist for Fallon Community Health Plan in Worcester, MA, a nonprofit, federally qualified HMO contracting with physicians throughout eastern Massachusetts.
As part of the patient satisfaction improvement process, Aug often acts as a "mystery patient": He schedules an appointment, goes through registration, sits in the waiting room, and goes through the examination process.
"I told one group practice that if I were a homeless person, I’d camp out in their office. You’re in comfortable surroundings and can spend hours drinking coffee and nobody ever bothers you, or even talks to you," Aug recalls.
A lot of the waiting time has to do with scheduling problems, Davis points out. Fallon offers scheduling consultations with outliers so they can learn to schedule more efficiently. Improving your scheduling often means changing the way you’ve always done things, he adds.
Aug and other "mystery patients" observe how the office staff handle the waits that inevitably occur. "We check to see how they communicate with the patients, whether they keep them apprised of the waiting time or act disinterested about it," he says.
It’s not enough just to reduce the amount of waiting time; providers also should focus on enhancing the quality of the time spent waiting, says Mary Malone, MS, JD, CHE, vice president of Press, Ganey Associates, a South Bend, IN, health care satisfaction measurement firm. "There are simple things practices can do, like giving patients a clipboard to write down any questions they want to ask the doctor," she says.
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