Improving patient satisfaction scores

Providing outstanding service to our patients isn't rocket science. Patient satisfaction isn't a department in your practice. It is a philosophy where everyone, regardless of their position and/or title, in practice follows. To obtain stellar patient satisfaction scores or to have a five-star rating on online review sites, consider these four suggestions. These four suggestions are the starting point - the basics. These suggestions will elevate your patients' impression of you and your practice, enhance your reputation, and generate a word-of-mouth buzz that creates moments of magic for your customers.

Common sense is sometimes not common. Having common sense is doing the obvious. It is a little more than treating your patients like you would want to be treated. Consider these questions: Would you like to wait several months to obtain an appointment with your doctor? Would you wait in the reception area (not waiting room) or the exam room for an hour before seeing your doctor? Would you like to receive the results of your lab work or imaging studies within several weeks? If you answered no to those questions, you can be certain those are the same answers given by your patients.

Simply treating your patients the way they want to be treated is an approach to getting five-star online ratings. Take into consideration that what you expect might be different than what your patients might expect. For example, when your patient is seen promptly by their dentist, accountant, and lawyer, they will expect that same level of respect for their time by you and your practice.

Flexibility – I think of flexibility as pivoting when events don't occur as expected. Rules and policies are nothing more than guidelines. It is common in medicine that when younger physicians have a new or novel idea, they will hear from senior physicians, "That's not the way we do it here. We have done it this way for a long time, and we don't need to make any changes." That ostrich mentality is not the way to improve healthcare or make a practice more efficient and productive. We must avoid a mentality or policy of "not invented here."

For example, before the pandemic in 2020, physicians were resistant to providing healthcare over the telephone. These doctors didn't realize that they were providing medical advice over the phone before telemedicine became a standard approach to healthcare delivery. When a doctor refills a patient's prescription in the evening or on the weekend, they usually do not keep a record of the phone call. Yet, the doctor was legally responsible for the decision to prescribe over the phone, and there was no compensation for those phone calls. However, in 2020, with the pandemic impacting nearly every practice, doctors pivoted to telemedicine, were able to record the phone calls, and were finally compensated for providing care using telemedicine. Doctors soon figured out that they didn't need to have the patient in the office and didn't always need to be eyeball-to-eyeball with the patient and didn't always need to examine the patient. Telemedicine improves access to care, improves chronic disease management, reduces the no-show rate, and enhances efficiency. Finally, this technology enhances patient satisfaction scores and enhances scores on online reputation review sites.

Solving problems - There are two types of problems to solve: clinical and non-clinical. Non-clinical issues that have nothing to do with your clinical acumen. Non-clinical problems address complaints and meet a patient's needs. An example of a non-clinical problem might be an arthritic patient who has difficulty opening the door to the restroom or the door to enter and leave the office. If this is an issue for your patients, then consider finding doorknobs that allow patients with decreased grip strength to open these doors. Numerous doorknobs can facilitate turning doorknobs. (Figure 1 is an example of an ergonomic, non-slip doorknob available from Amazon) This is an example of identifying the needs of your patients and solving their problems.

Recovery – No matter how skilled you are, you will have patients who experience adverse reactions to medications or have a complication. You can have a long-term satisfied patient for years, but as soon as something bad happens, you must recover. It is that recovery that will be the patient's final judgment on just how good you are. Remember, studies have proven it is much less expensive to keep an existing patient than to attract a new one. It is necessary to recover from a problem, which gives the patient renewed confidence to continue to remain in the practice. Sometimes this means going beyond just fixing a problem. Sometimes you must provide a recovery so impactful that it keeps the patient in your practice.

A common complaint from patients is accessing healthcare. Suppose a patient has an acute problem and calls for an appointment. They don't want to hear that the next available appointment is in several weeks or that they should go to the urgent care clinic. A practical solution to recovery from this issue is to set aside two 15-20-minute time slots-one each morning and one in the midafternoon to accommodate urgencies or emergencies. This avoids patients being told to come to the practice, and they will be "worked in." This may result in patients with appointments in the reception area being delayed. This is because staff will be preoccupied with acute patients who need to be seen immediately, as they were when they called to see the doctor. These two time slots are seldom left empty, and the result is a recovery from a problem that certainly needs solving.

Bottom Line: These are the four basic components of achieving stellar patient satisfaction. These simple yet powerful tools are the key to ensuring that every patient has a positive experience with you and your practice.

Shep Hyken, CSP, CPAE is a customer service and experience expert, award-winning keynote speaker, and New York Times bestselling author. He can be reached at (314) 692-2200 or [email protected]. or (http://www.hyken.com)

Neil Baum is a physician in New Orleans and the author of The Business Basics of Building and Managing a Healthcare Practice, Springer 2023