Reach Out to Physicians: They're Customers, Too

With the physician customer, it’s easy to get caught up in all the ways you want them to partner with you in delivering care. The word “partner” can mean a lot of things, but in an ideal world, it means that you want them to be nice to your staff, treat your patients well, provide the highest level of care and refer all their patients to you.

If this is your primary view, you’ve likely overlooked a major role physicians can play as partners—the physician as customer. Your job is in knowing and understanding your physician customer and what they want, as well as being proactive about fulfilling those needs. 

One of the biggest mistakes made by healthcare leadership is in assuming that physicians like to problem solve in the same way that they do. That means committees, consensus and input, and lots of it. Physicians solve problems, but they don’t approach things the same way that management does, for a number of reasons. 

According to Dr. Joseph Bujak and Thomas Atchison there are two leadership cultures in a hospital organization: the collective culture and the expert culture. The differences in each provide an understanding of why physicians and administrators are typically in different camps when it comes to problem solving.

For starters, leaders tend to be more process focused, while physicians are results focused. Leaders want outcomes but worry that everyone is on board along the way. Physicians are much more focused on “what’s in it for me” and their own self-interest.

That’s not surprising once you think about how physicians got to where they are today. They’re bright, driven people trained to find out what’s wrong, not what’s right.

Before you can expect the physician customer to embrace and be a part of your organizational service effort, there are three things you need to do:

1. Meet their needs as a customer. Find out what that physician wants and needs and then do your best to meet those requirements. Take the time to build personal relationships both internally and externally with your key physicians.
2. Create opportunities for collaboration. If it’s your processes that don’t make sense or if there are stumbling blocks that make you difficult to do business with, then get those issues out of the way. Show them you can resolve issues and keep them resolved; that will go a long way to moving physicians to seeing how they work with you in creating the patient’s service experience.
3. Consider building a formal issue resolution tracking process. This can help you know what your physicians need, what’s being addressed, who’s accountable and when resolution can be expected.
4. Make their experience worthwhile. When a physician feels that you’ve wasted their time, or haven’t resolved or followed up on the issues, they’ll be much more cautious about doing business with you in the future. Make the experience worthwhile: You’ll show that you respect their time and expertise and go a long way to building trust—something essential to keeping them involved with your organization.

Thinking of the physician as a customer and getting them more involved and connected with your organization is key in helping you to differentiate your organization from others. When quality is equal, physicians will choose to go where they feel wanted, respected and nurtured

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To discuss how your organization can earn new customers and improve its customer service delivery, contact us via the Web.

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