So how can you make your patients more satisfied with your services? Like any other business, you must treat them like the valued paying customers they are, and you must reflect that ideal throughout the entire patient experience.

As the physician, you set the tone for your practice’s operations. Your staff will observe your attitude toward patient service and follow your lead. “A really strong service orientation has to start with the physician,” says Susan Miller, the practice administrator for Family Practice Associates of Lexington in Kentucky. “Frankly, I don’t care how many times I tell staff to be nice to patients. If the physicians don’t embody that, if they don’t have that attitude of wanting to help patients, you’re really fighting a losing battle. There needs to be a service orientation that goes all the way to the top.”

And being an effective leader also means knowing when to listen to your staff.

“Leadership has an important job to play, but [physicians are] not necessarily the smartest kids on the block,” says Leonard Friedman, public health professor and the coordinator of Health Management and Policy Programs at Oregon State University. “I may have an MD behind my name, but the people who know the most about scheduling are the people who are sitting behind that front desk.”

You can’t achieve high patient satisfaction when your staff is unhappy. Patients can easily detect the dysfunctional atmosphere bred by a team of quarreling, dissatisfied employees.

“Let’s assume your front-desk receptionist just has an absolutely foul attitude and, although she is very efficient, she is also as mean and nasty as can be,” says Friedman. “What’s going to be the word among your patients? Well, they’re not going to be very happy when they walk in, and I suppose some of them are going to tell their friends that this particular clinic has a real problem with its staff. And there’s the potential that some patients may vote with their feet and find another physician group in town. The actions and activities of your lowest-paid employee could have significant financial repercussions on the larger practice, and even on the livelihood of your physicians.”

One of the most effective ways to keep your staff happy is to give them the autonomy they need to do the jobs you hired them to do. Miller says that her 10-physician group empowers its staff to suggest policies and procedures to their supervisors. Processes are developed by the people who actually carry them out.

But even then, says Miller, you have to trust your staff enough to allow them to bend the rules if necessary. “Our attitude is that we are here to take care of patients,” says Miller. “It’s a simple philosophy: Do what you need to do to make that happen. I usually tell staff that our policies and procedures are guidelines, but if they think it’s necessary to go around a rule to properly take care of a patient, then by all means they have permission to do that.”

Bradford also tells her physician clients to empower their staff to solve problems as they arise in their own departments. For example, the front-desk staffers at one pediatric practice were frustrated that harried parents often resisted, or even refused, to hand over their insurance cards at check-in (on the grounds that the request was an unnecessary nuisance).

So the staff brainstormed and came up with a game. Receptionists distributed small cards to incoming patients with 15 punch holes. Each time a parent checked in and handed over her insurance card without being asked for it, she earned a hole punch. Once the card had been punched 15 times, the parent’s child “won” a Beanie Baby.

“The parents were coming in the office and even before the door closed behind them, they were pulling out their insurance cards and waving them,” says Bradford. “It became a fun game for both parents and the front-desk staff, and it almost wiped out their insurance card problem.

“My advice is always to be creative and hand problems over to the people who have to handle that situation and see what they can come up with,” says Bradford. “Those on the front lines are often the best resources.”

Providing a total patient service experience means paying close attention to each part of the patient visit, from the time a new patient calls your office for an appointment until that patient checks out after the visit. This process can be broken down into five distinct elements, each of which presents an opportunity for your staff to either maximize patient service or to disappoint and alienate patients. They are:

1. Previsit information gathering. Sanderson-Austin says the gold standard in this area is to adequately prepare the patient before she enters the office so that both she and the practice already have all of the information they need for the visit by the time the patient walks in. “Access is the No. 1 complaint patients voice about their office visit experiences,” says Sanderson-Austin. “And by ‘access,’ I mean that patients are not just able to simply get an appointment when they call, but that they are able to see the specific physician they want to see in the time frame they want to see him, and not have to wait beyond that time in the reception area.”