Managed Care Update |
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Patient Satisfaction From the Front Line BackRandolph Brooks, O.D., F.A.A.O.Have a question for Dr. Brooks? A local pediatrician recently came to our office for a contact lens exam. I was pleased when he told me how professional and helpful our employees were, especially since he’s both a patient and an important referral source for our practice. (I relayed his comments to the staff at our next meeting.) He then told me that his practice has a problem attracting and keeping good employees, especially at the front desk. He was concerned about how they treated patients. Indeed, my front-desk team leader Roxanne told me that when she delivered a box of candy to this doctor’s practice at Christmas, she had to wait several minutes while two of his employees carried on a conversation without even looking her way. Remember, managed-care plans want their members to be satisfied with their experience in your practice. You want patients to be satisfied so they’ll refer other patients. Satisfaction begins at the front desk, the focal point of most practices. Yet managed care has placed added stress on these employees. After many conversations with my employees, I came up with three things to consider when giving your front-desk operations a checkup. 1. Are the right people at the front desk? No doubt you want to book an appropriate number of patients into your schedule without sacrificing quality of care or patient satisfaction. If you underbook, office income drops due to holes in the schedule. If you overbook, you are too busy to make important recommendations to patients regarding products or services. Total income per patient then drops. A pleasant, efficient front-desk team is essential to maintaining an efficient schedule. These employees must be able to allocate time and resources, maintain priorities and delegate to others. They also must remain calm, even when irate patients refuse to believe their insurance doesn’t cover every product and service you offer. Don’t make the mistake of having the newest person answer calls, take care of insurance, schedule appointments and handle money. Any new employee (and probably many doctors) would feel totally bewildered. 2. Do you train them enough? This, perhaps, is the biggest morale booster. In my practice, we have weekly staff meetings that consist of two 30-minute sessions. The first session consists of separate educational meetings for our front-desk, clinical and dispensary employees. Everyone then gathers for the second session to discuss office productivity and the results of our individual meetings. We sometimes have an outside vendor discuss LASIK, frame styling, a new contact lens or some other area of interest. Be sure to provide telephone training, too. Let your front-desk employees know how you want them to answer the phone. Offer protocols on how to handle true ocular emergencies and any other urgent problems. Also make sure your staff is familiar with authorization and referral requirements of the plans you accept, and that they can answer patients’ questions about fees and even your qualifications. Use scripts if they’ll help your staff feel more comfortable. 3. Do you empower your staff? If you ask front-desk employees what they dislike most about their jobs, many would probably say that the doctor either micromanages or offers no training or input. Poor morale results when employees feel as if they may not make even the simplest of decisions on their own. Let your employees act within guidelines that you set. For example, we allow our employees to make any type of refund or adjustment without asking permission, just to keep a patient satisfied. (Of course, we still try to learn what the patient’s problem was.) We may not agree with every decision our employees make, but unless a decision would cause a major problem, we won’t second-guess them. Patient satisfaction and loyalty, and even employee morale, begin at the front desk. Having the right people there and training them is essential. My pediatrician patient’s comments about our employees made us all feel as though we had passed an important checkup. It also allows us to move front desk first toward greater practice growth.
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| © Review of Optometry OnLine
June 15, 2000 |
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