5 Tips for Opening a New Office

Attention to office feng shui can help your practice feel like a more welcoming environment.

When starting a new practice, you have plenty of ways to help increase your chances of success. Follow these easy-to-implement tips to help boost efficiency and revenue in your office.

1. Hold morning staff meetings. Consider holding 15-minute daily morning meetings to discuss the patient’s records that will be coming in for treatment that day. These short meetings can help better understand and prepare for each patient’s needs. Ensuring the staff is aware of the treatment that is to come for the day can help increase efficiency within the practice.

2. Install patient and employee suggestion boxes. Patient and employee feedback are important to the well-being of any physician practice. Consider placing patient suggestion boxes inside each examination room and employee suggestion boxes in the break room. Their feedback can be helpful in understanding what is going well and what needs to be improved at the practice.

3. Create a health blog. Blogs can be an easy and effective way to draw traffic to your practice’s website. Consider creating a health blog that discusses things patients would be interested in reading about, like healthy eating habits. If the blogs are written well, people may share them on social media platforms like Facebook, drawing more traffic to your practice website. A simple blog post could help advertise the practice and attract new patients.

4. Utilize a customer relationship management software. Consider using a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) or Physician Relationship Management (PRM) software to organize your referral system. These types of software are great ways to make practices more efficient by having all patient details stored in one place that is easy to access. They also help streamline invoices, which can reduce the problem of failing to send out invoices.

5. Make waiting rooms welcoming. Waiting rooms can easily cause dissatisfaction among patients. Consider posting a sign that asks patients to check in with the receptionist if they have been waiting more than 15 minutes. This reminds patients that you value their time and guards against their being “forgotten” during especially busy times. Also, consider adding calming art to the waiting room to make it more appealing.

Lexy Garrett is a marketing manager at Sageworks, a financial information company that provides financial analysis and cash flow applications to business owners and their accountants.

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