Does your medical practice allow anybody to post links and comments on your Facebook page?The short answer is yes. We do. Why? Because we think allowing patient to post links and commenting on our practice’s Facebook page helps us achieve these four things:1. It encourages communication. 2. It allows us to address issues that we would otherwise have a hard time addressing. 3. Other patients will benefit by reading the discussions. 4. We ...
Brandon Betancourt
What patients need to know about coding
Health insurance is very complicated. At our practice, we deal with health insurance all the time and even for us, it gets to be very complicated sometimes. So it is natural that patients have a hard time understanding it as well.Therefore, I decided to summarize a conversation I had with a patient in an effort to help other patients understand, at the very least, a portion of how medical health ...
Medical practice unintended consequences
The airlines, in an effort to recoup revenue, started charging passengers to check luggage a while back. Seems like a great strategy. Not only are they recuperating revenue, they are giving passengers a reason not to bring luggage they don’t need. This of course saves money on fuel.The result? More bags in the main cabin.Since there is an incentive not to check a bag, more people bring their bags as ...
Why your medical practice should adopt social media
"Twitter? I don’t have time for that, besides, my life is boring; nobody wants to hear about my boring life." This is a common response when I talk to people about social media.One of the reasons I think many have a hard time persuading docs to adopt social media, is because docs don’t understand what they can do with social media or how they can use it for ...
Physicians and their staff need to put on a consistent show
This past summer, I had a few parents complain to me about our staff. The parents wanted to let me know that they were treated nicely by the staff, but they had noticed things from the employees that they didn’t appreciate. They mentioned that the staff seemed annoyed and irritated, even bored at times and a bit disingenuous.I wanted to investigate the issue before I reprimanded the staff. Things ...
How physician practices can compete with retail clinics
A reader recently wrote to me: "Brandon, in our area, we’ve seen a few retail clinics pop up. What can we do as a practice to let patients know that visiting retail clinics is not in their best interest?"We had along discussion. So I put together a summary of our conversation. Below is a rundown, more of less, of what I ...
What your medical office can learn from Norman Rockwell
This past summer I got a chance to visit Washington DC. While I was there, I saw a Norman Rockwell exhibition at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. As it turned out, the exhibition was the private collection of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg. The exhibition highlighted Rockwell’s masterful storytelling.I didn’t know much about Norman Rockwell before that day. I knew he was a famous American painter and I had seen ...
Should patients be charged for no shows?
No shows. It seems that no matter what we do, we always have them.Despite the fact that we call every single person on the schedule to remind them of their appointment the day before (the staff personally makes the call. We don’t use an automated system) we found that in 2009, we had 389 no-shows.Slicing the dataIs 389 a high number of no-shows? I guess it depends on the size ...
Why doctors have poor customer service
One of my docs was telling us about a patient’s experience at another practice. Apparently, the parent was at her wits end with her crying baby. She called the on call doctor to ask for advice and the doctor told the patient, “your baby has colic’s; turn on the vacuum and stop calling.”It turned out the baby had some gastric condition (not colic) and needed treatment. The patient ended up ...
How JetBlue can improve your medical practice
I got a chance to fly JetBlue for the first time recently. Since I had heard so many good things about the airline, I was looking forward to experiencing the JetBlue, well, experience.I took four flights in total with them. While outbound, they lost my bag. While inbound to Chicago, my last leg was delayed about 2 hours. I then I had to wait another 80 minutes for my bag ...
