Practice Management Managing Wait Times for Greater Customer Satisfaction Urgent message: Though patient waits are often unavoidable, under- standing—and addressing—the causes can help mitigate negative impact on the patient and the practice. Alan A. Ayers, MBA, MAcc he term “urgent care” conveys immediate med- ical attention, so it’s no surprise that the great- est determinant of cus- tomer satisfaction for an urgent care center is how quickly patients are treated and released. But how does a busy walk-in clinic— which must be prepared to handle any condition while staffing at levels to remain profitable—mini- mize the negative impact of long waits? The answer is in identi- © Imagezoo/Images.com/Corbis fying the causes of patient waits while working to improve the overall patient experience. T Patient Perceptions of Wait Concentra Urgent Care recently studied patient atti- tudes toward wait times at its 324 medical centers in 40 states. The analysis included systems data of total 32 visit times (arrival to de- parture), wait time from arrival to being seen by a provider, and customer satisfaction scores pertain- ing to wait. [Disclosure: The author is assistant vice president of product de- velopment at Concentra, based in Dallas.] Although one would ex- pect patient attitudes to be more negative the longer they’ve waited, the Concen- tra study revealed that pa- tients have negative atti- tudes towards any wait— even self-reported wait times of 15 minutes or less were frequently rated “too long.” In addition, the longer patients waited, the more likely they were to report a time longer than their actual wait. Perceptions of wait are important because they influ- ence patient attitudes toward every other element of the experience—including the quality of medical care delivered. The Concentra study demonstrated that the 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 | S e p t e m b e r 2 0 0 8 w w w. j u c m . c o m