BUSINESS & MEDICINE How to ‘De-Commoditize’ Your Urgent Care Practice ■ KEVIN J. RALOFSKY, MBA I f your practice is in its first year or two of operations, it is easy to stay on top of what your patients want, the quality of their care, and the customer service they are receiving. But as your practice grows, patient counts increase, and you add more corporate clients to your occupational medicine business, you also add links to the customer service and quality care chain. Increasing the number of care providers, nurses, office support team members, and back-office operations staff creates the potential for growth. However, this growth can have a detrimen- tal effect on your practice; somewhere along the way, the oppor- tunity to deliver average, mundane, monotonous—or even poor— quality care and customer service will rear its ugly head. How can you compete and succeed if your patients feel that you offer the same quality of care and the same long wait times as other providers, in addition to a difficult phone menu to navigate and even good, yet impersonal, customer service? Perception Plays a Large Role in Quality Care It is unfortunate that even though you commit many years to education and training as a provider, your patients are unable to gauge the actual quality of care that you provide. As a mat- ter of fact, most patients will judge the quality of the medical care they receive from a customer service perspective, based on how they or their family members were treated during the visit. In working with my clients over the past several years, I have paid close attention to the delivery of quality customer service. In fact, I believe that this issue is so important that I have conducted studies to quantify this unfair phenomenon. In part of my research, I wanted to find out how customer service and “personalizing” the visit would play a role in the per- ception of a patient’s time in the waiting room. Kevin J. Ralofsky is president of MedCapital, Inc., a consulting firm focusing on strategic growth and rev- enue generation and specializing in the urgent care industry. He can be reached at (330) 304-5680 or by email at kralofsky@med-capital.com. 30 Two groups were evaluated—a control group and a test group. Each group’s patients waited exactly 15 minutes in the waiting room, then were brought to an exam room by a nurse to have vital signs taken and the chief complaint addressed. For the control group, the nurse only engaged in conversa- tion pertaining to the visit. For the test group, the nurse engaged in additional conversation addressing personal ques- tions, such as “How was your holiday?”, “I really like your blouse”, “How old are your children? They are so cute!” The nurse saw each patient in both groups for the same amount of time. In addition, all patients waited five minutes for the physician to come into the exam room after the nurse left. Again, the control group was treated clinically only and not engaged in any personal conversation. For the test group, the physician also engaged in personal conversation and addressed family members present. The physician spent approximately the same amount of time with each patient in each group. Remember, both groups had the same wait times and approximately the same amount of time with the nurse and the physician. When we asked the patients about their visit, though, the control group reported waiting 23 minutes while the patients in the test group said they waited 11 minutes—an average of 12 minutes less in the waiting room. Recognizing that the patient’s perception of the visit is col- ored by such non-clinical factors is an important realization. This means you can delegate important functions that might add up to greater patient satisfaction, while freeing yourself to concen- trate on providing medical care. Draft a “Quarterback” Physician managers tend to take on more than they can handle in business. It is imperative that minor tasks be delegated to those team members who can be trusted to see them through. To make sure this gets done on a consistent basis, you will want to select a “quarterback” to lead your office through its daily operations. JUCM T h e J o u r n a l o f U r g e n t C a r e M e d i c i n e | Fe b r u a r y 2 0 0 7 w w w. j u c m . c o m