The Entrepreneurial MD - Physician business coaching and resources for physician businesses and medical practices

Entrepreneurial challenges,

Friday

Apr102009

How do physician practices demonstrate quality?

Friday, April 10, 2009 at 01:18PM

This quote from a book I'm reading (and shall review in a later post) got me going:

"Although price in healthcare is also important, when people are looking for healthcare services, quality services will almost always outweigh price".

The book then goes on to emphasize that, with the changing marketplace of consumer-driven healthcare, it's important to be able to demonstrate quality in order to entice patients to join or stick with your practice!

What then is Quality?

The Institute of Medicine, in its Crossing the Chasm Initiative says this:

"Quality in healthcare is the degree to which health services for individuals and populations increase the likelihood of desired health outcomes and are consistent with current professional knowledge."

From a practical standpoint, quality is going to be best demonstrated by (with some examples in parentheses):

Recognizing who's at risk for what diseases: regular age-appropriate screening, gene testing for chronic disease?
Providing convenient and timely access to the necessary medical services: convenient scheduling for affordable visits
Providing an appropriate assessment and evaluation: a thorough H and P, coupled with excellent listening skills and your finely honed intuition
Making the most correct diagnosis or diagnoses: evidence-based medicine, using a clinical decision-support tool?
Starting the right treatment at the right time, while also considering the patient's preferences and circumstances: informed consent, including the family in decision-making where appropriate, specialty consultation where necessary
Ensuring the appropriate follow-up: electronic or manual tickler systems, timely follow-up intervals, reminder emails or phone calls
Motivating the patient to stick to their treatment regimens: providing health coaching to follow up, using motivational interviewing

Patients typically lack the sophistication to be able to truly evaluate many of these "quality actions or behaviors". Heck, when I sent a patient to a surgeon for an evaluation and likely operation, I couldn't be certain which the best surgeons really were. My referrals were based on educated guesses, physician community reputations and happy patients reporting back to me.

Instead, patients will judge you and your practice's quality based on how helpful your receptionist was on the phone, how quickly they could get in to see you, how long they had to flip through out-dated magazines while waiting for their appointment, the warmth of your tone and your receptiveness to their questions and whether they could make head or tail of your bill!

And yet, in many of the managed care and pay-for-performance environments, you'll be judged on very different criteria.

As a physician hell-bent on thriving in a competitive marketplace, which parts of your practice must you systematically tackle in order to demonstrate the best quality?

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The entrepreneurial medical practice |

Philippa's entrepreneurial adventures,

Monday

Apr062009

The Entrepreneurial MD gets a mention in the AMA News

Monday, April 6, 2009 at 01:37PM

In an amednews.com April 6th article titled "Broadcast your brand: Find the patients you most want to treat" by Pamela Lewis Dolan, I was quoted after a thorough and thoughtful interview on the topic of creating a personal brand.

To elaborate a little, a personal brand is the promise you put out in the world about the unique and distinctive ways in which you serve your patients or clients. It is represented by the way in which you speak about your services or products, your business and yourself, how you convey your presence both physically and virtually, and how you put your special stamp on every touchpoint a patient or client has with your business.

Quoting myself in the article:

"The only way to stand out from all the other doctors around you is to consciously put some attention on what makes me different and unique"

... and that is indeed what I believe with all my entrepreneurial physician heart!

In order to be quotable, I obviously have to pay attention to my own personal brand.

The Philippa Kennealy brand is one of being of educational and thought-provoking service, responsiveness and having fun while working. How's the brand doing? :-)

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Show customers you really care,

Tuesday

Sep092008

Service with a smile and your physician business bottom line

Tuesday, September 9, 2008 at 11:59AM

How ready are you to drop being a customer of a business with indifferent or rude employees?

And when last did you actually check on how your answering service, front desk or office staff were behaving towards the patients or clients who are so crucial to your success?

Although this article titled Apathy Will Get You Nowhere primarily references hospital employees, it is not a stretch to see how the principles and ideas apply to any medical practice, or non-medical business. Whether you have one part time receptionist or a staff of 50!

Here is an excerpt from the article:

Hire well. "We want to hire the right employee for the job," Cunningham says. "We focus on interviews and really make sure we have the right person in each position."
Everyone's accountable. Providing excellent care is everyone's responsibility, Cunningham says, including the chief executive. "The buck stops with him. It stops with me, and my managers and supervisors," she says.
Talk to your employees. From 9 to 10 a.m. each day, Cunningham says there are no meetings scheduled at Medical City. That's because hospital leaders-including Berrett himself-are out on the floor, learning how hospital processes work. Executives also host forums quarterly, allowing employees to bring forward concerns. "We're not just talking to them by e-mail, but face-to-face," she says.
Celebrate accomplishments. Medical City's efforts have won it several awards in recent years, Cunningham says, and each one, no matter big or small, is celebrated. "We let people know when we do well," she says. "We let them know so they are proud to work here. When you put that pride into them it just affirms that they're doing good work."

In that vein, please join The Entrepreneurial MD for our September Business Development free teleclass on the topic of "How to provide Amazing Customer Service", with the Amazing Service Guy speaker, trainer and customer service expert Kevin Stirtz. You can sign up here. I know I will be focusing intently on what he has to say!

The entrepreneurial medical practice |

Marketing for the "marketing-allergic",

Wednesday

Dec262007

The second biggest marketing mistake an entrepreneurial physician can make

Wednesday, December 26, 2007 at 08:42AM

Last month I wrote about the biggest mistake you can make with your marketing, but a very recent experience showed me that there are a few other doozies as well.

Short personal story....

I mentioned I was going on vacation last week. Well, as I and my family walked into the Puerto Vallarta airport lounge in Mexico, we were directed to our prepaid transportation desk.

Being both polite and naive, I listened to the transportation desk attendant delivering an admittedly earnest and compelling sales pitch about special offers available to customers using their taxi service. I understood the offer to be for free tickets to some fun local attractions (that we were planning on doing) in exchange for having breakfast at another hotel the next morning, and being shown the property for possible future visits - it would be 90 minutes of our time in all.

I don't know what I was thinking - greed was probably a factor - but we said "yes" and duly showed up for our ride to the hotel at the appointed time the following morning.

Breakfast went well - we ate while a pleasant gentleman regaled us with the wonders of their timeshare program (why didn't I figure out earlier that this was a timeshare hustle?) My husband immediately cautioned him that we were not impulse buyers with big financial decisions, and the guy expressed his sympathetic understanding.

Time stretched on and the 90 minutes became two hours, and my 5-year old daughter grew impatient. "Only 5 more minutes" we were promised.

Not to belabor the story, at the two-and-a-half hour mark and under heavy pressure from the implacable salesman and his virulent female sidekick who kept sweetening the pot, my daughter was sobbing in frustration at being fobbed off with "5 more minutes", I felt both guilty and angry, and these sales people were impervious to our distress. They were demanding a decision that day. And now I was damned if I was going home without my "goodies" for all our trouble!

This is where the big mistake was made. Irrespective of how irresistible the offer had become, one fundamental error undid all its attraction. The sales people forgot who they were speaking to. They were so locked into their pitch that they ignored the humans at whom it was directed! They failed to see two angry, guilty parents on the other side of the table.

Effective marketing and selling - be it your medical practice services, your new whiz-bang tech tool or your consulting - are all about relationships, and connection.

Yes, you will need to practice and even perfect your "pitch", which may be about how to stay healthy or how to solve the XYZ problem your customers are experiencing. But when your pitch becomes a pedantic lecture, or an exercise in bullying, you will undermine all your effectiveness and persuasiveness. You will sever your precious connection with your audience.

One secret to getting all the business you want, that this vacation experience reminded me of, is to remember that people value feeling valued. Your sensitivity to their mood or situation will score big points - it shows you are truly paying attention!

PS: the second error, which you may have spotted, was the lie. The false expectation that we would spend only 90 minutes of our valuable vacation time exploring what was in fact an attractive future vacation offer. We were furious at being lied to about how much time this would really take. So, remember ..... no false promises either!

Here's another much more beautiful way to share a "better way to market" tip, thanks to this delightful short video sent yesterday by Robert Middleton.

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