Meet Your Patients With Their Clothes On

What You Read Here May  Surprise You – Things You Didn’t Learn In Medical School
Best Practices in Healthcare – Part II of the Series, How the Initial Patient Meeting Helps Set the Stage for Trust and Communication Between Doctor and Patient

Part II

The Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Hospital in Minnesota Case Study

In Part I of this series on 1st Impressions when Meeting Your Patient, we discussed how clean, bright, attractive offices play a part when establishing a positive first impression. In this segment, however, we’ll discuss some simple tips for helping your practice be a practice of choice with patients.

Warning: Side Effects of implementing some of these practices may result in you or your organization receiving additional referrals and business from other patients, so don’t read any further unless you could use some easy, practical tips for adding additional patients to your practice.

Here is some information you can use right away:

When you meet your patient for a discussion, give that patient the opportunity to keep their clothes on!

Let me explain. So at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, the offices, as I mentioned earlier, have one thing that I haven’t yet shared with you. They have a small curtain in the offices so that the office has a private area for undressing right in the exam room. Now some of you will say this is impractical or that you don’t have enough space in your offices to do this, but the one setup at the Mayo clinic didn’t take up much space, and had hooks for patients to hang their clothes up and again, was standard in every exam room I viewed.

Why, you may ask is this important? We’ll let’s take a look at the dynamics that are created with a typical office visit or facility that is not setup like the Mayo Clinic.  We’ll come back to the waiting room and check in process in another article, but for our purposes today let’s take you (put on your patient hat please) and imagine you are the patient. Ok, so you, as the patient are taken back into an exam room, that’s way too cold for comfort. It may have an overabundance of white walls and floors —who said healthcare offices had to be white and that any pictures on the walls if they are even present look like they were snatched up as a last resort at one of the discount stores close-outs. Now, there’s nothing wrong at purchasing pictures at the local discount store, and you don’t have to spend much at all, to make a pleasing environment, but you do have to put some thought into it in terms of what colors, (not white please) will be most appealing to both you, your staff and patients when entering your exam rooms. If you are design challenged hire a design student or college student to help you, but make the room visually appealing please.

Now back to the attire or clothes issue or lack thereof in most health care practices. So, you as a patient are put in this stark white room that is so cold and bright that it makes your head spin, and are then told to undress and get in this little gown, open in  the front or back depending upon which type of exam you will be getting, and then you are left to sit on the exam table usually, with the crinkly little paper sheets until the healthcare professional finally shows up to grace you with their presence. In the interim, you may or may not have some tag eared magazines to read, or you may simply try to determine how quickly you may be seen by the noise of the doors slamming or closing in every room that is near the one you are in. As the doors and commotion is heard outside the exam room in which you are sitting, you are making assumptions about the practice, the practitioners etc. In some offices, patients may wait for close to an hour or more, in these cold, uncomfortable, and annoying environments,  depending on the practice, and then when the provider comes in beaming and smiling and hurriedly glancing down at the chart saying “Hello Ms. or Mr. Smith, my name is  ________ and how are we doing today?”  Do you wonder as the provider why your patient may not be exactly in the right frame of mind to not only meet you appropriately, but feel good about this encounter?  Meeting, especially as a new patient, a provider in this type of scenario doesn’t exactly put the patient at ease, and actually, isn’t good for the provider either because if you have a patient who is comfortable, you are more apt to be able to get a more complete and accurate history.

Ok, so I think you get the picture. Now, let’s contrast this by how the Mayo Clinic handles their patient appointments.  When your appointment time is called you are escorted back to a nicely decorated exam room, with warm inviting colors that has the comfortable bench and a small area at the back with a rounded curtain (like the ones you sometimes see for rounded showers).  The pictures are the walls actually look like they were “chosen” to be there, and although I’m sure that there are waiting times during emergencies that would make the situation different, but in most cases, patients are seen within minutes of being placed in the exam room. Someone at the Mayo Clinic obviously has put some thought into the temperature of the room, because the feedback I received patients was that it was not too hot, nor too cold in the exam rooms. Obviously, this is somewhat subjective, but I don’t think there’s anything written in stone which says exam rooms have to be freezing! Ok, on with the process at the Mayo clinic. So the patient is in the exam room, but has not been asked to undress yet, and meets their provider fully clothed. Note: seeing the patient fully dressed can actually yield clues about the patient that you would not see if you had them disrobe before meeting them. Now who do you think will be able to get a better history? The practice that has made the patient wait – with minimal clothing, or the Mayo Clinic Practice who has setup an environment to make the patient feel comfortable and has given the patient the chance to meet the healthcare provider on equal footing. Once the patient has met the healthcare provider, the patient is asked to disrobe using the small curtain area right there in the room, while the provider sets has access  to the computer in the room and waits for the few minutes that it takes for the patient to change into the exam gown. Now, I know some of you will say but this can waste time, I need the patient to be ready when I come into the room etc. or others who would say there’s no way to minimize the wait time, there are emergencies etc. And I will say to you that’s true, there are emergencies and patients understand this, so if you’re going to have them wait longer than a certain amount of time, how about communicating this to them and/or rescheduling for another day if you’re way behind. In terms of time wasted, there are ways using the computer in a room where you can actually work on something while the patient changes, and in the visits I was viewing at the Mayo Clinic, it only took a few moments for the patients to disrobe because somehow knowing that the physician was in the room, made the process much quicker. And the patient isn’t worried that someone will open the wrong door and there they will be in all their glory, because they have a curtain giving them privacy while they quickly change.

Somehow, during my visit with more than 7 different healthcare providers at the Mayo Clinic, all of them managed to be on time, and this happened on 2 separate visits.  Just some food for thought. All of you may not be able to incorporate this into your practices but I hope I’ve given you something to consider about how you setup your interactions with patients. The one thing to remember is that when looking at your procedures for waiting room, check in, and exams, is to think like a patient and not like a provider in order to come up with best practices that will work for your office and will therefore as a side effect, bring you increased numbers of patients and more importantly, have more patients who are satisfied with the quality of their care.  It’s no wonder why the Mayo Clinic has waiting lists of patients from all over the world who wait for months to get in to see them. What lessons can be learned and implemented in your practice?