Prevent recurring service mistakes with root cause analysis

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.”