Comfortable investment: Making your office more patient-friendly

Some physicians are banking on the idea that designing a pleasant and easy-to-navigate office can increase patient satisfaction -- and their bottom lines.

By Larry Stevens, AMNews correspondent. March 17, 2003.

When thinking about how you can squeeze more income out of your practice, take a moment to consider where your office toilets are located, and whether your waiting-room chairs have stains on them.

Toilets and chairs may not be an obvious place to look for relief from tight reimbursements. But some physicians are looking at every part of their facility's environment to determine how office design and organization can create a practice that is more efficient, thereby allowing them to earn extra money by seeing more patients in a day.

These same improvements can be made without making patients feel like they're being herded through an assembly line, but instead making patients feel like they are getting more attention and better service.

When five-doctor Mystic Valley Urology in Stoneham, Mass., decided to ditch its outgrown digs and create a new office from a gutted building, Peter Tiffany, MD, one of the doctors in the group, knew he was taking a serious financial risk, so he needed to investigate how the new building could help pay for itself.

In this case, necessity was both the child and the mother of invention. The new building was designed in a way that could play an important part in realizing increased efficiencies that could help generate some of the needed cash to pay for it.

Mystic Valley hired Larry Brooks, principal of Medical Design International in Tucker, Ga., to design the new facility. The doctors obviously wanted a good-looking office. But even more important, Dr. Tiffany says, "We wanted [the building] to contribute to efficiency and patient satisfaction." Both factors would eventually result in improved revenue, Dr. Tiffany figured.