We’ve all had that annoying bank experience: you’re in a hurry, yet when you walk through the door at your local bank branch, the queue is of Disneyland proportions. But what if some helpful soul suddenly appeared at your side offering to help you with your banking needs?
Concierges have become a popular and welcome addition to the bank experience. Now, enterprising healthcare providers can adopt the concierge approach to enhance their own patient relationships.
Let’s find out how a concierge can not only add value to your healthcare practice, it can add patients.
A concierge is like a roving host
Here’s the scenario: a nervous patient arrives at your practice expecting to join a queue at reception and check in for their appointment with a waiting room full of eager ears listening in.
It’s awkward, especially for new patients who have to go through the process of setting up their new account equally publicly. And then, when they leave after their appointment, there they are again, sharing potentially personal information in front of waiting people with nothing else to do but listen.
With a concierge meeting and greeting patients as they arrive, your entire reception experience can be remodeled to provide a much higher level of privacy.
Check-in via i-Pad station
The first thing your concierge will do is to direct each patient to a confidential i-Pad station and help them check-in or set up their file, if needed. All personal discussions can be undertaken quietly at close quarters, not broadcast across a reception desk.
Coffee and a chat
This area of your concierge’s role may well prove to be the game changer for your practice. Quite simply, having a caring soul whose entire purpose is to manage the wellbeing of waiting patients – making them a coffee or cold drink, sitting right beside them if they’re anxious and helping them to find the right room when called – is sure to build a more than loyal client base.
A free-and-easy reception desk
Well, with a concierge, it won’t actually be a reception desk anymore. And that’s good news for your frazzled front desk. Unburdened from the endless demands of incoming patients, they can focus calmly on checkouts, payments, answering phones and setting up appointments. .
Not only that: freed from the need to meet, greet and process every arriving patient, your front desk can be moved to a more private place in your new concierge-and-patient-friendly practice design.
No more very public and potentially embarrassing conversations with patients checking out post-consultation. And that’s a recipe for repeat business right there.
Article originally published by Interite Health Healthcare Interiors. They are Australia’s leaders in medical fit outs and healthcare design. Contact them via website https://www.interitehealthcare.com.au/
