Craig Koniver, MD

Because I make it a point to get my patients feeling good first and foremost, it becomes so much easier for me to help them work on all the other stuff.

I believe wholeheartedly that we should be training ourselves to make deeper and faster connections with patients. Because, ultimately, the connections we have with our patients determine how well patients do and how much job satisfaction, let alone revenue, we enjoy.

A good rule of thumb when talking to a patient is to pretend that you are being watched by your patient without the ability to speak any words. The only way to communicate is through your body language.

While there are an ever-increasing amount of guidelines to follow, practicing individualized medicine is becoming that much more tedious and difficult. By having your own blog, you can immediately showcase yourself as an individual.

For medicine to evolve we have to start believing and accepting in the notion that as providers, we are marketers. Of course we are, we are servicing our patients and in order to serve them better (and ourselves actually), we need to start thinking like marketers.

Unfortunately with declining insurance reimbursements, increasing government bureaucracy, and patient demands, we are forced to see more and more patients every day. Combine this with pressure to stick to ever-changing guidelines and protocols, and we as physicians are now in the middle of some stressful pressures.