Patient engagement is the hot topic lately. Caring about an individual person who is your patient helps create meaningful engagement. It is also important that they know that you care about them. Having all the scientific answers does not make for a good relationship or for meaningful engagement. Obviously, having the medical answers is a vital building block. Understanding a person’s emotional state and having the ability to communicate any information in a way that resonates with that person arises from emotional intelligence. Therefore, to optimize our ability to treat patients, we must maximize our emotional intelligence.

Knowledge is power. We must educate the patient and any caregivers. Effective education is not a couple of pages downloaded from a website or a stock handout from your electronic health record (EHR) system. If it were only that simple. Patients often come away from a new diagnosis of diabetes with some handouts on diet and exercise or receive a folder full of paper after a major surgery. Education is a cornerstone of patient engagement. When done well, education guides the patient toward appropriate communication with the physician and staff. Spending time educating patients provides billing opportunities and leads to better outcomes, fewer call-backs, and happier patients.

Patient engagement has been a catchphrase for several years now. Much like humpty dumpty after falling off the wall or the elephant being “viewed” by the 6 blind men, patient engagement has been split into many separate ideas— each given different priorities and emphasis by different stakeholders and organizations. If, instead, we could gather the pieces together and return to the whole egg or true elephant in the room, we’d find that engaging our patients can solve numerous problems simultaneously. Effective patient and caregiver engagement can avert medical, social, and legal problems before they arise.

Password-sharing seems like the path of least resistance to get a job done in a busy medical office. Sharing passwords with other people can easily lead to multiple systems being compromised and misuse of account information.  Learn how to establish a password policy for your office. 

Neither physicians nor practices want to believe that embezzlement can happen to them. Yet, embezzlement has happened, can happen, and will continue to happen. We want and need to believe in our team members, and indeed, we have to believe in one another for any team to be effective. At Smart Business Great Medicine, our motto is Trust, and Verify! This means having policies to verify that trust is well placed and reviewing possible signs that trust has been broken regularly. Knowing the red flags will make fraud, theft, and embezzlement less likely for you. 

The process of physician recruitment is laborious and can be time-consuming. Always keep in mind that you are not just trying to replace a cog in the machine. You may well spend more waking hours with this person than you do with your family. Don’t take it lightly. A bad choice can yield months, if not years, of misery and regret. A good choice improves the practice, improves the business, and can limit your risk of burnout.

Employees with bad attitudes can have a significant impact on all your employees and your practice. Learn the best ways to deal with them.