The Crowded Clinic: The Importance of Office Duties to Help the Patients

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The case study: Crowded Clinic provided some good examples of what many busy clinics have to deal with on daily basis. Lately, there have been multiples computer systems to improve scheduling problems for the outpatient clinics, such as “Open Access”, “AdvancedMD”, “Medical Office Online”, and many more. These programs do help with daily operations of a medical office, however, in order to make patients feel more welcome few other things can be implemented. Such as letting receptionists handle arriving patients right away, instead of making patients wait while the receptionist handles phone calls, assist with prescriptions, and/or handle emergencies. It means that everyone in the office should multi task and should be cross trained, so they all can help with front office duties. This should be required upon hiring. Per Carrie Rossenfeld from Medical Office Today: other medical office personnel can be handling all phone calls, leaving receptionists do their primary responsibilities – checking patients in, answering their questions, and making them feel comfortable. (Rossenfeld, N. D.)
Waiting room of a medical office is the first thing patients see when they come in. The waiting room should have a lot of sun light, calming music playing in the background, soft paint color on the walls. The waiting room at the office should have some posters on different languages for those multilingual patients to feel more comfortable. The seats should be soft to accommodate needs of patients with chronic back pain. After all, patients do spend a lot of time waiting for a doctor appointment. Those uncomfortable seats cause patients to get anxious. They should have a water cooler to be available for patients, as well as tissues.
Front office perso...

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...possible and might be pricy.

Works Cited

Rossenfeld, C. (n.d.). Making Wait Time More Pleasant for Your Patients You Can Alleviate the Angst of Waiting and Keep Patients Happy. Retrieved from http://www.medwaittime.com/news/medicalofficetoday-makingwaittime.php
Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence US Army Training and Doctrine Command Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas. Arab Cultural Awareness: 58 Factsheets. (2006, December). Retrieved from www.fas.org/irp/agency/army/arabculture.pdf‎
Marohn, K., & Dickrel, S. (2012, December 09). Medical Interpreters Help Patients, Doctors Communicate. Retrieved from http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2012/12/07/medical-interpreters-help-communicate/1755007/
Brolley, E., Tu, A., & Wong, E. (2002, January).Communicating With Your Chinese Patient. Retrieved from depts.washington.edu/pfes/PDFs/ChineseCultureClue.pdf‎

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