5 Tricks to Improve Patients' Experience During a Clinic Visit

As medical experts like to joke, you choose a doctor only once in your life.

Customer retention is the name of the game, as clients are usually reluctant to change providers. However, building that trust isn’t easy. Patients will look for anything to disqualify you as a long-term partner. Not only will they judge your experience but also the appearance of your clinic.

This is why you need to do everything in your power to make their visit as pleasant as possible. Aside from having a beautiful interior and keeping the place clean, you should also provide great post-treatment care.

In this article, we’ll talk about 5 tricks that will help you improve patients’ experience and how to properly implement them.

1. Preparing for a visit

Older generations are used to phone appointments. However, user preferences have changed significantly in the last ten years. Nowadays, it’s much more common to schedule a visit via a website or an app.

It would be a good idea to implement the best optimization practices. Make sure that your website can easily open on different devices and that it’s fast enough. You should also place emphasis on usability, improving button placement, menu, and other small tweaks.

Aside from that, it also wouldn’t be bad to get a reliable scheduling SaaS. These tools will make your job a breeze, helping monitor check-ins, occupancy, and even parking space.

2. Making the first impression

It doesn’t matter if a person is a long-time patient of your clinic or not. A savvy doctor should always behave as if they’re seeing the individual for the first time.

We win or lose most of our clients due to architectural mistakes. Like any other business, clinics should follow certain unwritten rules when decorating their interior. Most notably, a patient should always feel warm and comfortable while visiting the office. Don’t forget that doctors’ visits are scary for most of us!

Aside from that, you should hire a professional medical office cleaning company. While you might think that any maintenance company can do the job, this isn’t actually true. Health premises are very different as we need to make the space as sterile as possible for the patients.

3. Scheduling and waiting

Even if you have the best SaaS on the market, there’s still a chance you’ll encounter scheduling issues. A small percentage of people will still come late or won’t show up at all. Regardless, we should always try to minimize these numbers. Specifically, we should send reminders straight to patients’ phones.

We also need to think about waiting times. They’re one of the most common reasons for low client satisfaction rates. You can tackle this issue by adding TVs and magazines and having better seating. Music can also help as long as it’s not repetitive and with taste. Providing free refreshments and having stable Wi-Fi will also work fine.

Alas, clinics also struggle with doctors running late or appointments being too long. Often, this occurs because you have too many visitors. If you think you’ve bit more than you can chew, we suggest you increase the medical team or add new facilities. No matter what, you should never allow patients to leave your offices dissatisfied.

4. Personal touch

Most clinics put a patient on a seat and tell them to wait until the doctor’s ready. This time can be better used to create a rapport with the visitor.

As they’re waiting for their appointment, one of the nurses can approach the visitor and review their medical history. Even if they’re well aware of their condition and they have information in the clinic’s database, these few minutes can make a difference in perception. A person will feel as if the provider really cares about their issue.

5. Post-care

Given the importance of client retention, there’s a lot of emphasis on post-care. Ideally, you should hire a person who would focus on making these calls. Ask a person how they’re feeling and if the treatment helped. Not only is this fantastic for branding and retention, but it can also lead to more frequent visits.

While sending birthday cards and making a few phone calls is fantastic, you should put your money where your mouth is. In other words, you can make loyalty programs and other discounts for loyal visitors.

These tricks are vital for new brands but also for businesses that aren’t growing. By focusing more on patient care, you can significantly increase your retention and, thus, long-term revenues.