If I Owned a Doctor's Office

So based on my frustrations with the current state of the medical system here's what I would do if I owned my own Doctor's office... or maybe just ran one - I don't have the time or dedication to actually do the schooling to become a dr.



1) Medical appointments can be scheduled online - hello! the rest of the world is using online scheduling, even the dealership I take my car to schedules service requests online. Its not like the technology is brand new or anything. Or hard to use for that matter!



2) There is a dedicated line for patients to call and leave a message and feel secure in the knowledge that their call will be returned the same day as long as they call before 2pm (stole that one from the RE's office - it really spoiled me to the realities of most medical practicies apparently).



3) Dr's offices would be run like a business - c'mon people I know things come up and aren't planned for, but if business operations can run on schedule where people make their meetings on time, why can't you? Maybe you should do a better job at scheduling the appropriate amount of time for each patient rather than living in an optimistic world and "hoping" that each patient will only take 15 minutes each.



4) Any pre-work that needs to be completed will be done before your appointment with the dr. example: if they need to take your blood pressure, etc. they should do that during the 10 minutes prior to your appointment. So here's a novel idea... if somebody is scheduled to see the doc at 1pm, tell the person that their appointment starts at 12:45. That way they are for sure there on time and all the preliminary stuff can be taken care of before the doc comes in. (got this idea from my cardiologist's office - the most efficient, on-time dr's office I've ever seen, and everybody is still very friendly and helpful)

That's basically what I would do, oh and some serious customer service training - it drives me crazy when you're standing waiting for somebody to come to the front desk so you can check in and you can hear a bunch of people all chit chatting about their weekend on the other side of the wall.

So anyways, that's what I think is wrong with the current state of doctor's offices. Not enough customer service and not enough emphasis on the importance of keeping to schedules and improving the ease of use.

Ok - need to go and leave my every two day phone call for the medical assistant at my OB's office now... it takes about 48 hours for her to call me back and the last time I talked to her was Thursday... but that's a story for another day...