Becoming a five-star customer service practice means focusing on patient satisfaction at both the macro and micro levels. When leaders at a healthcare organization or a medical practice say they truly embrace patient satisfaction as a cultural element, ask whether their staff has received training to sharpen its customer service and communication skills within the past year. If the answer is no, they do not take patient satisfaction seriously enough. Customer service and communication will quickly decline if you do not pay enough attention to them. They must become woven into the very fabric of your organization. Physician practice leaders around the country agree that this is a continuing process and many say they are not where they would like to be.

Practices have long used patient satisfaction surveys to assess their customer service strengths and weaknesses. Although patient satisfaction surveys offer tremendous benefits, practices shouldn't stop there, says Pat Kearney, RN, MPA, ARM, risk management advisor at Stevens & Lee in Lancaster, PA. Because patients visit your office only a few times per year, their insights can be limited or off-kilter. On the other hand, staff members and clinicians have a firsthand view of what goes on in your practice every day and may be able to ecognize poor performance patterns and recurring patient complaints.

Before you call your entire office staff for a meeting to discuss increased patient complaints, be sure your current office processes and policies are not the cause of these problems. Elizabeth Woodcock, MBA, FACMPE, CPC, a practice management speaker and author at Woodcock & Associates in Atlanta, says there are integrative problems from the minute patients walk into the practice. "One of the challenges is that we focus on staff and how terrible they can be and how we need to provide service, but we really set up an environment where, through our operations and patient flow, it is not very patient friendly."

In many practices, money is being left on the table because adequate and necessary follow-up is not being done by the billing staff in your office. Having protocols in place to follow up on a claim will yield additional and well-deserved revenue. To minimize follow-up, the first "follow-up" procedure should be submitting a clean claim on the first submission. Secondly, an aged trial balance report run each month by patient name is helpful in identifying all unpaid claims. Thirdly, correcting claims before resubmitting them will avoid another resubmission. The fourth guideline for diligent follow-up is to keep track of and address all denials.

Physicians provide free care for many reasons. It can be a passion for patient care, an understanding of the high cost of healthcare insurance, or a belief that it's just the right thing to do. For two Louisiana medical clinics, the goal is simply to see that all patients receive the same medical attention they deserve regardless of their working status, lack of healthcare insurance, or poor health history.

Paul Blair, MD, a facial plastic surgeon who owns a solo private practice in Hurricane, WV, remembers one of his patients asking him how much vacation time he usually took. He recalls thinking he and his family take less than two weeks of vacation during an entire year. But when it comes to vacation, the quality is often more important than the quantity. Whether you take a short weekend trip or a two-week vacation, you're more likely to get a real break and enjoy yourself if it's planned as far in advance as possible and done efficiently, Blair says.

Customer service is a principle that groups can't afford to take for granted-it's the key to protecting the existing revenue base and generating new market share, says Kevin W. Sullivan, cofounder of Sullivan-Luallin, a San Diego-based healthcare consultancy that specializes in customer service. Running a company that conducts patient satisfaction surveys for roughly 1,500 physician practices annually, Sullivan has learned a thing or two about what keeps patients happy. Not surprisingly, top-scoring practices throughout the country hold certain traits in common.