Practice Performance Surveys

Understanding your patient's views of your practice, particularly in today's economic environment, is an essential need for the physician-owner. While, most of us think we are providing solid customer service, in all likelyhood, customers/patients may have a different opinion.

Over the years, most business assume that because they have operated a successful business, then, we will always run a successful business. In other words, the attitude, "If it isn't broken, don't fix it" can lead us down a declining path. It is the business owner's responsibility to continually challenge the business process, to ensure excellent customer service is delivered.

A friend of mine asked my to edit his manuscript about the business of medicine. Through the pages I continued to see references to good customer service. And he's right. My favorite concept in the writing was, "Inspect, what you Expect." That's great advice and sounds an awful lot like one of the tenets of Leadership. Inspecting your staff's work, how they interact with patients, check-in/check-out, how your medical assistants escort patients and take patient histories, etc.. are all elements of "inspect what you expect."

Another tool to gain knowledge about the patient experience is to conduct a survey. I have conducted many over the years. There has never been an occasion where the survey revealed no improvement opportunities. Measuring the patient experience from the moment your patient makes the appointment, till the moment they check out, is vital to your delivering the patient experience you hope to deliver.

Primoro, Inc. conducts "Practice Performance Surveys" and can benchmark your results year-to-year. Continually improving your practice's performace, both in terms of medical care and customer service, is simply good business.