Abolish the Waiting Room
Sunday, March 15, 2009 at 2:37PM Whoever coined the term "Waiting Room" did the medical community a disservice. The term "waiting room" sends the wrong message to patients because it sets a negative expectation in their mind that when they arrive at the doctor's office, they will be waiting. Patients have been trained to bring a book, magazine or your iPod when you have a doctor appointment.
Simply renaming the Waiting Room to a patient lounge or some other innocuous term would ultimately not be helpful. Technology tools such as email or Twitter (see previous post) exist to help doctors manage their schedules and increase patient communication to minimize patient waiting times.
Not every doctor's office manages his or her waiting room (and by extension their patient's time) inefficiently. But for those medical practitioners who would like some tips and discussion on the pros and cons of adopting technology to help manager their practice, there are several barriers that get in the way.
Paying for the tool may not be the issue so much as training support staff to use the communication tools properly. A patient responded to the idea of their doctor using Twitter by writing "If you can find me a doctor who will even communicate with me via e-mail, I'll be grateful forever." With companies like Zagat's now rating doctors based on the quality of their communications, busy practitioners are faced with a dilemma -- improving their patient communication without adding undue burden on their staff's time.
The practitioner who wishes to dip their toe into the Internet-based communication pool needs to ask the following questions:
- What tools, preferably low cost and easy to implement, would help me increase communication with my patients in a meaningful way?
- I have a website -- isn't that enough?
- If I allow my patients to email me, won't my staff and I be overwhelmed (which lessens time spent on other productive activities)?
These questions are all valid but best practices and the appropriate mix of tools can help mitigate the downside. Every practitioner (like every patient) has different needs and there is no "one size fits all" solution. We have started the dialogue and in the future we will spotlight the best practices here and provide ideas to move the dialogue forward.
Reader Comments (4)
The staff at medical offices need to look at how car dealerships provide for customers while they wait. At mine, and many others, there is a TV playing current DVDs (and not showing Regis or The Insider), computers with Internet access, and copious amounts of coffee. In addition, there are continuous verbal updates on how much longer one must wait.
None of the above adds much expense, but certainly improves the atmosphere of the "waiting" room.
No doubt the 'waiting room' is a very unattractive experience. Anything would be an improvement. Amenities are nice but in my experience it's the unexpected waiting time that kills. There are enough free communication tools out there that physicians should be able to do a better job of managing patients' time. Twitter is good because it's hit critical mass but how about a physician-centric equivalent? In my estimation, the industry is big enough, and the patients are concerned enough, to support a stand-alone.
Though the personal response to a patient is always optimal these days one must accommodate busy patients who do not want to visit an office or be on hold for the health care provider. Unfortunately, we all know that that face to face meeting might with a busy physician might not be very 'personal' anyway. Our students and my patients alike generally appreciate the freedom of email, text messaging and instant messaging when the circumstances are appropriate.
It's not just the long wait. It's the lack of kindness from the staff. While in the waiting room I hear them talk about how they didn't want to come in to work. While waiting in the examination room I hear the doctors talking about their weekend to the nurses while standing right outside my door.