Staying under-capacity

If your appointment coordinator has every hour filled for weeks out, what happens when an emergency patient shows up?  Either the patient is refused or they get an inferior experience as they get squeezed in and can be left in the lobby for hours hoping for a cancellation.

A really nifty practice is to keep an hour free each day.  This allows that emergency patient to have the “New patient” experience.  They can arrive 30 minutes early, fill our paperwork, pay their deductible participate in a one-to-one interview get examined and radiographed properly.   Instead of the patient being treated like a low-value, “break/fix” patient the Doctor is able to tackle the chief complaint and structure a responsible treatment plan.

Our office uses a similar strategy.  We keep a spare EVERYTHING and carry about half of it in our service vehicles.  Our workday is rarely scheduled so tightly that we can’t respond quickly.  Even to our “fix it when it hurts” offices,  it is our hope that by showing excellence to these offices that they will adopt quality-approach in the future.