I have not always been excited to hear patient complaints. As a younger manager I absolutely dreaded when a patient wanted to speak to me. I felt that I had little to offer a patient who expressed anger or frustration with something that had happened and I was very impatient to get past the complaint and get back to my “job.”Now, I can’t wait to hear patients’ complaints. Complaints ...
Mary Pat Whaley
6 reasons why doctors won’t call patients back
Patients want to know why they can’t get a return call from their doctor’s office – here are six reasons why the calls have increased and physician offices are having trouble meeting the needs of their patients.
- Medication questions and requests for a prescriptions change. The average number of retail prescriptions per capita increased from 10.1 in 1999 to 12.6 in 2009. (Kaiser Family Foundation calculations using data from IMS ...
Pros and cons of private or hospital owned practice
Private practices are organized in a corporate model where the physicians are shareholders, or where one or more physicians own the practice and employ other physicians or providers. Private practices are almost exclusively for-profit. Physician practices are organized into corporations for the tax benefits as well as protecting the owners from liability judgments.Hospitals can be for-profit, not-for-profit ...
Signs that your practice is ready for EMR
My current practice is getting ready to go live on Electronic Medical Records (EMR), but it’s taken us over a year to get here. When I first started this job, we were supposed to go live with EMR in two months. After I’d had a chance to speak with everyone, I just knew the timing wasn’t right for the EMR. We would need to be able to run, and at ...
Your 10 minute office visit needs 8 people and 45 minutes of work
I sat at the checkout desk in my practice last week for the first time and as always, it was a revelation. If you haven’t worked your check-in and check-out desks recently, I highly recommend it.An insured patient that I checked out was shocked when I said the charge for her visit was $100. She said, “But he was only in the room for ten minutes!” I was briefly at ...
