Jason J. Davidson

First impressions are not only important - they're critical. How we present ourselves both verbally and physically to patients heavily influences how their overall experience will be at the practice. From their initial interaction with front-desk staff to their first meeting with the physician, a patient who has an outstanding first impression is far more likely to report an overall positive experience at the practice.

Here are five important points on making sure your patients' first 10 seconds to 30 seconds in a practice are outstanding.

Consider your front-desk staff to be the most critical in your practice. The manner in which they greet and receive patients sets the tone for the entire visit, their likelihood of returning, and their willingness to spread positive referrals. Patients should be greeted by name and with a smile upon entering. Front-desk staff should understand that their engagement with patients is mission critical, and that no task is more important than greeting patients warmly and authentically.

Reinforce to all staff that tone of voice is vitally important. 

 they interact with patients is as critical as what they say to patients. Feel comfortable with coaching staff on using a tone that is warm, friendly, and approachable with patients, as patients hear the delivery of the words as much as they hear the words themselves. Make sure you're modeling the same appropriate delivery yourself (see tip #5).

3. Friendly body language and facial expression. 

Encourage staff to maintain open body language with your patients. If culturally appropriate, a hand on a patient's shoulder may be reassuring and appropriate. Encourage staff to lean in toward patients while engaging and avoid closed body language.

Similarly, facial expressions are as important as the words being spoken. We often coach clients around the theme "affect must match the message;" in other words, a smile goes a long way in terms of helping a patient feel supported and welcomed. Make sure that staff understand the particular importance of using these skills during the first few moments of interacting with a patient.

 Nothing makes a patient feel as devalued as having to wait while a staff member chats with a colleague or, worse, finishes taking a sip of coffee before greeting. Again, reinforce to staff that nothing is more critical than openly and warmly greeting a patient upon arrival. The more welcomed a patient feels in the first 10 seconds to 30 seconds, the more successful their entire visit is likely to be.

 Make certain that you're modeling the same level of outstanding initial interactions with patients that you're asking of your staff. Greet patients by name, and make an effort to personally connect immediately. Avoid looking at a chart or appearing distracted upon greeting a patient. Giving patients your full attention during the first few moments will make a tremendous difference in their entire visit experience.

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In the first 10 seconds to 30 seconds of a patient's visit, you can make a big difference in their satisfaction with your medical practice.

Five Tips for Making a Dynamic First Impression on Your Patients

The art of storytelling is often an undervalued and sadly underused skill in a communication skills arsenal. There is much to focus on in a busy medical practice: policies and procedures, billing, staff issues and, of course, providing extraordinary patient care. In the fast-paced environment of our work lives, we forget that telling stories connects and humanizes us.

First, we need to be mindful of how to tell a good story. All stories begin with plot. A compelling story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. A frequent comment we hear in our work is, "I don't have time to tell stories." But some of the most vivid stories can be related in a minute or less if the key plot elements are present. Focus on setting the scene for the listener and providing the basic "plot outline" while relaying enough interesting detail so the listener feels as if she or he were there.

Second, by simply using some basic delivery mechanics - namely vocal variety or varying pitch, tone, and volume and captivating your listener - anyone can be a great storyteller.

Once you're able to relate your stories with passion, here are three applications for storytelling we frequently recommend to clients.

Oral histories are powerful. Oftentimes, listeners don't recall data, facts, and even outcomes shared during hour-long talks - but they do remember stories.

Put this to use in your own work with patients. There are a multitude of great stories to be told that don't compromise sound boundaries between you and your patients - perhaps an anecdote about a patient who was successful in smoking cessation or meeting fitness goals. Seek to not just "tell" but also show your patients.

Our own best practice is "Open every talk with a great story." You'll get the attention of your audience and often keep it. Some of the best speeches in history are a number of powerful illustrations woven together by a uniting message.

Consider how you can combine your expertise as a physician with the art of storytelling and you may be surprised at the increased impact of your community outreach efforts.

Stories are equally effective in individual interactions. Institute the "morning huddle" and take 10 minutes a day to share stories with each other, particularly those that reflect the successes and challenges happening in your practice. Hearing each other share sincere anecdotes will strengthen your working relationships and, ultimately, result in more satisfied patients.

Similarly, seek to use storytelling in coaching staff. When considering the same "show not tell" philosophy, you'll realize greater impact in both staff performance and morale.

Here are three ways medical practices can use storytelling - with patients and with staff - as a critical communication strategy.

Storytelling: A Valuable Communication Tool for Medical Practices

The new year is upon us, making it the perfect time for your practice to set achievable goals for 2014 that will make a significant impact on patient satisfaction and the bottom line. Focusing on strengthening perception of you and your practice through initiatives centered around improving oral communication can be an easy, effective, and low- to no-cost way to more effectively connect with current and prospective patients - efforts that should ultimately translate to improvements in volume.

Here are three New Year's resolutions to consider instituting in your practice.

1. Prioritize community outreach as a key factor in personal development plans

Providers are no longer just selected off of a list provided to patients by insurance companies. Consumers are actively researching and often choosing their providers based on reviews, word of mouth, quality data, and feedback on social media. Appearing in the community provides prospective patients the opportunity to develop respect and affinity for physicians by seeing the physician "in action" both as a thought leader and a community member.

Physicians should seek out community outreach opportunities that are well suited for them. For instance, consider community groups that may have shared interests and values or seek out opportunities that involve smaller audience sizes if you are reticent about addressing large groups.

Consider these appearances not "lectures" but rather opportunities to engage and dialogue with potential patients. Aim for at least one outreach opportunity per quarter.

Set a tone of collaboration in your practice by meeting for just a few minutes in the morning with all staff to review accomplishments and challenges, and plan for how you will make the day ahead a better day than the one before. Share stories about successes with patients and develop strategies to improve on pain points. Physicians can use these opportunities to model engagement strategies and lead by example.

During this huddle, set simple goals for the day, such as smiling at every patient and walking into the waiting area to greet a patient rather than yelling a name from the doorway. Simple goals such as these can go a long way, as is the case with our third resolution.

Every patient who visits your practice is entrusting his or her care to you. Say thanks for the visit, each and every day, and make sure your staff does so as well.

The more you treat patients as customers, the more likely they are to return and refer everyone they know to you in the future.

A new year is the perfect time for your practice to set achievable goals to improve patient satisfaction and your bottom line.

Three Patient Relations Strategies for Every Medical Practice 

In the retail space, many industry leaders report improved customer satisfaction scores during the holiday season. Despite the high-volume pace and workload, both staff members and their customers often smile more frequently, wish each other well and work to spread the good cheer of the season.

Perhaps it isn't only in the retail industry where we see this trend, but also in our day-to-day work within healthcare. In one family medicine practice where we consult, a practice manager was recently encouraged to hear a member of her front-line staff give a genuine "thank you for coming in" to a patient who was checking out after her visit. While it was encouraging to hear this, expressing genuine gratitude to our patients and making authentic connections shouldn't be a seasonal focus. Rather, it should become a daily focus, as readily apparent in July as it is in December. If you can make the "holiday spirit" the norm for your practice, you will likely be rewarded with more satisfied patients, happier family members, and an increase in referrals.

Here are five functional steps for front-line staff to take to bring the holiday spirit to patients year-round:

 As with the real-life example recently shared with us, patients are often surprised to hear a warm thank you for their business, but they shouldn't be. Practices should be focusing on treating their patients as customers and reinforcing their loyalty clearly and consistently.

 Front-line staff should focus on greeting patients by name, taking a moment to inquire how the patient is doing, and establishing a warm and authentic connection.

 Work with front-line staff to set clear and reasonable expectations for patients. If patients need to wait for their appointment time, coach staff to share this clearly and compassionately. If a patient will be getting a follow-up call after an appointment, explain how long they can expect to wait and then follow through accordingly. Informed patients are satisfied ones. 

 Patients want to know about their care providers and have a personal connection with the people taking care of them. Taking the time to share something as simple as, "Amanda is a new RN to our office and we're very lucky to have her. She'll be with you in just a moment," only takes a few seconds, but the opportunity to build positive affinity towards the provider or staff member is priceless.

 Physicians set the tone for patient experience in their practices. If you expect your front-line staff to engage proactively and warmly with your patients, it's up to you to model these best practices with every patient.

While most of these steps may seem like common sense, it's easy to overlook them in the midst of a busy practice. Treating our patients well and with kindness reinforces their continued loyalty and encourages word-of-mouth referrals - the very best kind of marketing.

Making the holiday spirit the norm at your medical practice can result in more satisfied patients, happier families, and an increase in referrals.

Five Steps for Improved Customer Service at Your Medical Practice

Community outreach is an integral part of a successful practice. It provides an opportunity to build positive awareness of the practice to prospective patients who may not learn about the practice through other means.

An important component of a practice's community outreach is for physicians to speak on - and share their expertise about - healthcare-related topics of interest to their patient base. Not only can this exercise further cement a physician's reputation as a healthcare expert in the eyes of prospective patients, it can also help develop the personal physician-patient relationship patients desire.

Considering most physicians will only have the availability to participate in a handful of these presentations each year, it is critical to maximize the time spent on these efforts.

Here are eight considerations for choosing presentation topics and delivering strong presentations.

1. Choose the right topic at the right time.

 While physicians speaking to their community will often bring in a crowd, choosing a timely topic will bring in a larger crowd. Physicians should determine what issues matter most to their community, and where their guidance and insight can make the most difference.

To help identify timely topics, physicians can speak with staff, patients, and members of their community who interact with large numbers of people such as school teachers and local news reporters who cover healthcare issues.

 If a physician is considering a presentation topic that people can learn about through a quick Internet keyword search, then that topic is likely not the right choice.

If people want to "learn" about a topic, they can watch a video on YouTube. A flesh-and-blood presentation should successfully build rapport and audience affinity for a physician, and that's accomplished by not only masterful delivery, but also picking topics that lend themselves to inclusions of stories, personalization, and good question and answer opportunities.

 Physicians should be cautious about picking topics that lend themselves to easy presentations, such as flu season in the winter, or allergies in the spring. These are topics that today's savvy consumers are researching independently - and then likely discussing with their current physician.

Consider including these issues in a presentation rather than making them the focal point. For example, a presentation on winter wellness can include a discussion of flu as well as other winter health issues.

 Community members generally want to come to presentations that are relevant in a number of ways, and narrowing content too drastically tends to defeat these purposes. For example, we've seen much better attendance at talks marketed as, "steps to healthy living: exercise, nutrition, and wellness," rather than obesity or even weight management.

Going broader provides an opportunity for the physician to discuss more topics of interest to the community, therefore encouraging greater interest and interaction.

 Since one of objective of these presentations is to attract new patients, it's critical for physicians to avoid topics that may polarize an audience or alienate sections of the audience.

While a controversial topic may attract large numbers of attendees, providing a presentation on the topic that makes the entire audience think positively of the physician and his or her views will be difficult.

6. Remember: Presentations are different from lectures. 

To deliver the most effective presentation, physicians need to get away from viewing these speaking opportunities as lectures. They should, instead, consider them interactive opportunities to develop rapport with the community.

As such, it is worthwhile to build rhetorical devices strategically into the presentation format. For example, it is more effective to throw an idea out to the audience and ask questions around this thought rather than simply getting to the end of a talk and asking the audience for questions about the entire presentation. Physicians will find a drastic upswing in the number of questions asked - and the connections made.

Make sure time is set aside to interact with the crowd following the talk. This will give attendees an opportunity to pose questions they were not comfortable asking in front of a crowd.

These interactions, when handled properly, will help physicians establish even more personal connections and may help "seal the deal" for those attendees considering the physician as their caregiver.

 Remember to incorporate critical best practices of community outreach delivery when giving the presentation. These include avoiding overreliance on slides, incorporating personal stories and anecdotes, injecting humor where appropriate, and rehearsing delivery before the presentation.

When combined with the right topic, these best practices will help physicians deliver a presentation that accomplishes all of the objectives of the outreach effort.

Here are eight considerations for physicians when choosing presentation topics and delivering presentations.

Physician Community Presentations: Topic Selection and Delivery Tips

Whether in person or by phone, current and prospective patients' first contact with your practice is likely through your staff. These staff members have a single opportunity to make the very best first impression possible - an impression that will reflect not only on the practice as a whole but on you, the physician they are coming to see or considering seeing.

Ensuring your staff are leveraging high-level communication skills is critical to their ability to build rapport and begin the development of long-term relationships with your patients.

We recommend the following five best practices for selecting, managing, and supervising staff.

The importance of the interview process should not be overlooked, nor should the manner in which you select your staff. Practice administrators and physicians may sometimes overemphasize knowledge-based interviewing - that is, simply asking concrete questions and asking candidates to self-assess strengths and opportunities versus behavioral and experiential models. In addition to these interviewing "standards," consider asking candidates to both respond to typical and unusual scenarios that might present in your practice setting as well as engaging them in patient and peer role-play interactions during the interview. Utilizing these interviewing strategies will be some of your most powerful indicators of how the candidate would actually communicate with your patients.

Many practices are moving towards scripting to provide a guide for staff members and encourage standardized, consistent responses to patients that capture the information the practice needs. While scripting definitely has its place in the practice setting, it should not replace the need for communication training.

It is often difficult to script such complex situations, and these are often scenarios where the use of a script, which limits a personal connection between staff and patients, may actually frustrate the patient. You simply can't "script" an authentic connection with a patient. Make sure that your practice's use of scripting does not have the paradoxical effect of disempowering your staff's problem-solving and relationship-building skills.

We suggest scripting for simple situations, such as greeting and rooming patients. For more complex interactions, such as fielding a unusual complaint or coping with an emotionally unsteady patient, we suggest ongoing training. Such training can take the form of devoting time to group discussion and skills building during team meetings, as well as the opportunity for staff to role play such scenarios, both with each other and practice management staff.

3. Focus on delivering total communication. 

In our work with clients, we bring attention to the three main components of communication: content, or what you're saying; voice, or how you're saying it; and physicalization, or the use of facial expressions and body mechanics to send a host of non-verbal messages. Many staff we've worked with say they receive extensive coaching on the content of their interactions with patients but little to none on "how" they sound and look during these interactions. In fact, we've found that many never had the opportunity to receive feedback on these skills, let alone refine them.

By providing training and coaching to your staff members on all the components of effective communication - vocal inflection, volume, tone, pacing, and physicalization - you will likely see a marked improvement in their ability to effectively connect with patients.

4. Analyze telephone communication skills. 

Most patients - both prospective and current - will interact with staff by phone, and this is often the initial means through which they connect with your practice. Telephone communication requires certain skills that are different from face-to-face communication. To ensure effective communication through a phone, some individuals may need to speak slower or louder than they do during face-to-face interactions, while some may need to become especially aware of their tone - they might sound far more rigid or uncaring than they would be perceived in person.

We often recommend management teams take a "cold call" approach to assessing telephone communication skills. Leverage a trusted colleague to place a few calls to your clinic as a prospective patient. You'll gain valuable insight on both the content and delivery during typical telephone interactions between your staff and current and prospective patients. These insights are a great help to focusing your coaching in this area. Is their volume appropriate? Do they speak slowly enough to be comprehensible? In addition, consider whether staff sound personable and approachable by phone, and whether they provide concise, easily understandable responses to information requests.

5. Taking the right approach to training. 

It can be challenging to provide the level of supervision, coaching, and training to staff for the development of their communication skills. But it's important to understand that building these skills isn't just an investment in the staff; it's an investment in your patients and therefore your practice.

Devote the time and resources necessary to help your staff become more confident in and improve their communication skills. When staff  interact in an effective, empathetic, and compassionate manner with your patients, they are able to build unbreakable, long-term relationships that are likely to help to generate a cascade of word-of-mouth referrals.

Here are five best practices for selecting, managing, and supervising your medical practice staff and improving their communication skills