“People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
– Maya Angelou

To be on a higher-level means to do things beyond the norm. Asserting your medical office for the right reasons is the surest way to make meaningful connections with your patients ensuring continued trust, loyalty, and profitability. Today, we’re listing down three things to elevate your practice to a whole new level by shifting your perspective, productivity, and performance.

1. Clarity

   Starting off with a strong foundation, it will always be helpful to start conceptually from the ground up. Always design with purpose and intentionality. Without a clear handle on your own vision for your practice, you will just wander aimlessly making expensive mistakes, and reluctantly end up with a practice you settle with. Success is a journey of intentionality. We encourage you to do journaling as an exercise. Put down into words what you envision for your office. Clarifying this as a non-negotiable statement enforces your basis and will be your guide when you encounter decisions down the road. It also strengthens your motivation into achieving your own desires and will them into reality.

   It’s not just a self-actualizing exercise. Knowing your desires clarifies for your designers how each office is going to be designed. If you want to have more revenue in a Med spa, for example, a designer can integrate retail displays in all patient consultation areas where staff can push for additional products at any given time. See how your desires translated as design interventions created opportunities for retail upselling? Knowing your goals brings out strategies to make the objectives come alive.

   Clarity is also about knowing your audience so that you design accordingly for your target market and who you are serving. It can be geo-centric; an urban office will look much different than a family practice in the suburbs. It can be defined by specialization, with Med spas being designed differently than a Surgical Office. Knowing the details of your practice both internal and external can clarify your project briefly down to the last details which should be helpful in designing with purpose.

2. Flow

   We talk about the process as a journey and similarly, your patient’s experience in your own office is another journey worth thinking about. Spaces are never static, they say messages nonverbally to anyone who inhabits them, and being attuned to these messages is a great way to control and define what they communicate to your patients. How do you want to make them feel? Comfortable? Secure? Warm? Relaxed? In full trust with your service? There are many ways to achieve them by using Interior Design. It’s up to you to make the experience of each space pleasant, inviting, and compelling enough that they feel comfortable to come back.

   Upon entering the practice, the patient needs to have an almost instinctive “lay of the land” where do they go to check-in, where do they stay to wait? Aside from clearly defined spaces, a patient can really benefit from wayfinding signage that will direct people to specific areas of your office so they don’t feel the least bit tentative about where to go next. A confused patient just piles on more anxiety to an already uneasy visit. A confident patient is a patient that will come back for more.

   Flow is also applied to how the work is done in the most efficient manner. It doesn’t do your staff well when they will need to travel back and forth to complete the most basic of transactions. Having everything needed in one organized station can work wonders for your staff’s productivity and may even improve their encounters with the patients. There’s always the attention to Anthropometric and Ergonometric data to make the workplace more effective. Your staff will thank you for it and your patients will indirectly benefit from that additional consideration.

3. Simplify

   To make the essentials visible is a process of removing what doesn’t contribute to the grand scheme of your office. Trimming the fat makes your practice a lean organization that makes smart use of its resources and technology to its full potential.

   While it is easy to make things simpler, thinking on a higher level is to ask how to make things better. This speaks about constant improvement – a tireless march to make your patient’s experience better always.

   Technology plays an important role to make processes better. Automation is good and practical, especially in the new normal where close contact is limited. But there’s always a limitation, you don’t want to completely lose the human touch in your patient’s experience. Check-ins can be made on portable or freestanding virtual kiosks, but they will not completely render the job of a receptionist obsolete. Technology is meant to help people do things better so take advantage of it in streamlining and automating your processes.

Whether you’re starting from scratch or have a current office that needs to be refreshed, this list will be beneficial to understand what ways you can work on another level. If you find yourself wanting to start that journey with us, contact us for a complimentary consultation, and let’s embark together on an intentionally world-class medical space.