34 min
Encore! EP297: A Driver of Patient Engagement and Clinician Team Success That Is Almost Always Overlooked, With Jerry Durham Relentless Health Value™
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- Medicine
For a full transcript of this episode, click here.
This show has implications for provider organizations of all stripes, especially those looking to succeed in value-based care or those who need patient trust and relationships for any other reason, including just patient volume.
This episode also is for provider organizations who are trying to prevent clinician burnout better.
It’s also for practices trying to get themselves into narrow networks where patient satisfaction is surveyed at some point in the process, and this includes Centers of Excellence networks.
You know what the rate critical is that I talk about on the show today with Jerry Durham that rarely, if ever, gets talked about in any of these contexts? It’s not some fancy data artificial intelligence thing or something else the doctor needs to be clicking on or nurses need to step up and handle. Nope. I’m talking about the front desk. What an overlooked secret to success or a clinician and clinical failure point!
Consider that what goes on on or about the front desk is either gonna set up the doctor or other provider for success or make it really really hard for them.
This is what I talk about today with Jerry Durham in this encore episode from a couple of years ago that is still so incredibly relevant because the insights that Jerry shares are so often overlooked and they impact both patients but also doctors and other clinicians in ways we don’t often think about but, in this era of staff shortages and burnout, I’d suggest maybe we should.
Here’s something I never really understood: how physicians and nurses more often than not get to be responsible for the entire patient journey, including, start to finish, patient satisfaction. But if you just take one look at any random poorly rated physician’s reviews, they’re usually littered with complaints about the front desk in the practice. Negative reviews, of course, are not limited to front desk diatribes; but there’s often a lot of front desk commentary in them.
It has always seemed to me to be a common and strange phenomenon in healthcare provider practices where the front desk is like a totally separate little fiefdom with a different mission statement and goals from the healthcare providers in the same exact office. Isn’t that odd when you think about it? I mean, first, the front desk is literally physically separated from everybody else. No matter which direction you approach from, there’s at a minimum a half-wall barrier surrounding them. Sometimes, in directions most likely to receive an attack, I suppose, there’s been added a big glass barrier.
Liliana Petrova pointed this out in episode 236 of the Relentless Health Value podcast, and it was really the first time that I had thought about it at all and also thought about the implicit message this sends not only to patients but also to clinicians. That whole physicality of the setup, it just screams, “We over here have nothing to do with the mission or vision of anyone else in this place. We have our own thing going on over here, and to do it, we need to be protected from you all and all of your chicanery and untoward goings-on, you doctors and nurses and patients!”
So, I was really inspired the first time I heard Jerry Durham from The Client Experience Company talking. His message, as I understood it, was that a practice really on board with helping patients achieve the best patient outcomes and, nothing for nothing, erode clinician burnout includes the front desk in their thinking. Jerry has said that there’s four phases in the patient life cycle, as he calls it, which is sort of a synonym for the patient journey:
1. Marketing
2. The moment that a patient/person engages with the clinic or office
3. Provider interactions
4. The post course of care
So, all of these phases—all four of them—are critical to both patient outcomes and experience but also, really, to business success. So, you kind of almost have to
For a full transcript of this episode, click here.
This show has implications for provider organizations of all stripes, especially those looking to succeed in value-based care or those who need patient trust and relationships for any other reason, including just patient volume.
This episode also is for provider organizations who are trying to prevent clinician burnout better.
It’s also for practices trying to get themselves into narrow networks where patient satisfaction is surveyed at some point in the process, and this includes Centers of Excellence networks.
You know what the rate critical is that I talk about on the show today with Jerry Durham that rarely, if ever, gets talked about in any of these contexts? It’s not some fancy data artificial intelligence thing or something else the doctor needs to be clicking on or nurses need to step up and handle. Nope. I’m talking about the front desk. What an overlooked secret to success or a clinician and clinical failure point!
Consider that what goes on on or about the front desk is either gonna set up the doctor or other provider for success or make it really really hard for them.
This is what I talk about today with Jerry Durham in this encore episode from a couple of years ago that is still so incredibly relevant because the insights that Jerry shares are so often overlooked and they impact both patients but also doctors and other clinicians in ways we don’t often think about but, in this era of staff shortages and burnout, I’d suggest maybe we should.
Here’s something I never really understood: how physicians and nurses more often than not get to be responsible for the entire patient journey, including, start to finish, patient satisfaction. But if you just take one look at any random poorly rated physician’s reviews, they’re usually littered with complaints about the front desk in the practice. Negative reviews, of course, are not limited to front desk diatribes; but there’s often a lot of front desk commentary in them.
It has always seemed to me to be a common and strange phenomenon in healthcare provider practices where the front desk is like a totally separate little fiefdom with a different mission statement and goals from the healthcare providers in the same exact office. Isn’t that odd when you think about it? I mean, first, the front desk is literally physically separated from everybody else. No matter which direction you approach from, there’s at a minimum a half-wall barrier surrounding them. Sometimes, in directions most likely to receive an attack, I suppose, there’s been added a big glass barrier.
Liliana Petrova pointed this out in episode 236 of the Relentless Health Value podcast, and it was really the first time that I had thought about it at all and also thought about the implicit message this sends not only to patients but also to clinicians. That whole physicality of the setup, it just screams, “We over here have nothing to do with the mission or vision of anyone else in this place. We have our own thing going on over here, and to do it, we need to be protected from you all and all of your chicanery and untoward goings-on, you doctors and nurses and patients!”
So, I was really inspired the first time I heard Jerry Durham from The Client Experience Company talking. His message, as I understood it, was that a practice really on board with helping patients achieve the best patient outcomes and, nothing for nothing, erode clinician burnout includes the front desk in their thinking. Jerry has said that there’s four phases in the patient life cycle, as he calls it, which is sort of a synonym for the patient journey:
1. Marketing
2. The moment that a patient/person engages with the clinic or office
3. Provider interactions
4. The post course of care
So, all of these phases—all four of them—are critical to both patient outcomes and experience but also, really, to business success. So, you kind of almost have to
34 min