Four Fundamental Components of a Quality Service

Designing and implementing a quality service involves four key ingredients. As you design your service, consider these aspects to ensure you deliver exemplary patient care.

1. It's based on a solid mission and purpose. What is the mission and purpose, you might ask? The mission and purpose is perhaps the most important concept of any business or practice. Simply stated, it is the what and why a practice exists. The what is the service you provide to your patients. It's the combination of the knowledge, skills, and processes of your practice to deliver care to the patient. The why is the benefit your service provides to the patient. The why isn't to make money. Earning a profit is an indicator of how well your core business operates. It's a metric to monitor, not an objective to attain. The mission and purpose are always rooted in the world of the patient. Your mission and purpose are what you do and why you do it for the benefit of the patient. Every process, touchpoint, and interaction with the patient must be designed around the mission and purpose. If you're an orthopedic surgeon, your mission and purpose might be to provide diagnostic and surgical interventions that allow the patient to ambulate and regain pain-free mobility in their daily life. Or maybe you're an ENT, and yours might be to provide diagnostic and therapeutic interventions that allow the developing child to hear, have fewer ear infections, and miss fewer days of school. You'll notice that neither of those statements is the physician's benefit or gain noted. That is an incredibly important fact to keep in mind. Your clinic doesn't exist for you; it exists for your patients.
2. Quality services understand their customer. In the case of medical practice, they know their patients. I know it might sound trivial, but our patients are more than hypertension, diabetes, or degenerative joint disease. They are people with medical conditions who also think and, more importantly, feel emotions. Understanding what your patient is thinking and feeling will give you great insight into designing a process or practice that satisfies, if not delights, your patient. Do you know why patients are coming to your clinic? Is it because they have a choice? Because you're the best? Because they have to? Why are they staying with you? Answers to these questions will give you better insight into your patients' thinking and feelings.
3. Are designed to reinforce the mission and purpose via a solid, thoughtfully developed servicescape. What is a servicescape? It's everything that encompasses your service presence in the marketplace. It's your online presence. It's your signage. It's the location and appearance of your physical clinic. It's how friendly and responsive your staff is to patient requests and inquiries. It's how thoughtful and caring and competent they think you are. It's all the touchpoints with the patient, both physical and virtual. Each touchpoint must be designed to reinforce and influence the patient's perception of your service.
4. They are monitored and adjusted as needed. Once you've put into place your servicescape and processes, you must watch them to ensure they perform well and according to your expectations. Create some meaningful metrics that provide data you can act on quickly. These might be internal data points, such as time from check-in to seeing you, or they might be external data points that you might collect via a survey of the patient. Processes aren't something you do once. Quality processes are something you continuously do.

If you'd like more information on how you can develop quality processes in your practice, be on the lookout for my new book, Great Care, Every Patient - The Physician's Guide to Improving Any Process. It's arriving soon. Sign up today to learn more.