The first thing he saw was the dead fish.

“If they can’t even keep a fish alive, how are they going to take care of me?” The question, posed by a patient at a practice where consultant Vicki Bradford was conducting a focus group, was asked in jest. But the person who posed it reminded Bradford of a simple truth about patients: They will make clinical decisions based on nonclinical information.

Bradford says you can distinguish yourself from your competitors by sweating the small stuff. “Find out what your patients want and need, and then train your staff to deliver it,” she advises.

How? Just ask them.

Julie Sanderson-Austin, vice president of quality, research, and management at the American Medical Group Association, recommends holding your own informal focus group with an assembly of loyal patients. “Ask them what you can do to make their experience with your practice better,” she advises. “When practices do … they are amazed at how easy the fixes are. Patients really aren’t that demanding. Your patients’ feedback is your best source for determining how you can develop a service-oriented practice.

“Monitoring how patients feel about your services and knowing whether or not they are satisfied with them is just a part of doing business,” says Sanderson-Austin. “And the last time I checked, medicine was still a business.”

Gauging patient satisfaction shouldn’t be a one-time exercise. “It’s an ongoing process that’s never done,” says Bradford. “Some practices think, ‘OK, we’ve completed our survey, and we’re finished.’ But they’re not. They have to do it again to compare their results from previous times to determine if they are performing any better or worse.”

Regardless of whether you hold patient focus groups, offer an online satisfaction survey, or simply hand patients a paper survey with a clipboard and pen, experts agree it’s essential to identify what your patients want and need on an ongoing basis.

For example, Bradford says that one of the most common complaints practices receive from patients is about lengthy wait times. Yet extended wait times are sometimes unavoidable no matter how efficiently you run your practice.

So be creative: Give patients something to do. One group Bradford worked with decided to put a jigsaw puzzle table in its waiting room. The puzzles were such a hit with the practice’s (mostly senior citizen) patients that many started showing up before their appointment times just to work on it. “Sometimes when they don’t have anything to do, they’ll come in without an appointment just to work on the puzzle,” a front-desk receptionist told Bradford.

Another of Bradford’s clients (a group of orthopedists) invested in two electric massage chairs for its waiting room. “The result was that they couldn’t get their patients out of the chairs when the doctor was ready to see them,” she laughs.

And what about those outdated golfing magazines in your waiting room? Do patients really notice them? You bet, says Bradford: “Oddly enough, that’s one thing they consistently pay attention to.” So don’t just bring in old magazines from home; subscribe to publications for your practice that actually would appeal to your particular patient base. They will take note.

Empower your staff

The fact is that many practices are not user-friendly; that is, their patients frequently have to deal with long telephone waits, delayed physician responses, extended periods of time in reception areas, and poorly trained front-desk staff.

Although high-quality patient care should be your practice’s ultimate goal, you’ll have little chance of achieving that if you can’t retain a steady patient base.