Softwords Blog

The Ever Changing Practice

How do you know your patients? We're not talking about their diseases and injuries, or even their names, but about the types of people who make up your practice. Almost every aspect of running your practice will be enhanced by having a good knowledge of who your patients are. If your patients are mostly middle class professionals, your scheduling problems will be very different from those of a colleague whose patients are mostly seniors. If you have a preponderance of young families with babies and school age children, you may find that your time management has to take into account a daily number of lengthy phone calls, which might not be a problem for another doctor whose patient base encompasses many new immigrant patients who prefer to see the doctor rather than make phone calls.

Few general practices today maintain a stable patient demographic base over the long term. The population from which you draw your patients can and probably will change over time, and one day you may become aware that you are seeing more demanding patients than you used to, or have a higher number of patients calling in to ask for prescription refills. Your staff may complain of more no-shows or more walk-ins.

Ignoring the problems in the hopes that they will go away isn't the solution. What has to be done is to analyze what changes have occurred in your patient base over the past few years that may have caused the problems you are now encountering.

(This article first appeared in The Practice Manager, a newsletter published by Don Price & Associates.)

Click here to read the entire article in publication

Click here to view other Softwords publications

Note: All issues from the year 2000 are provided in Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF). To view these files, you need to have Adobe Acrobat® Reader installed on your computer. You can download this free software from the Adobe Web site.