Doctor reports feeling deeper connection to his patients; improvement in patient satisfaction score
TUESDAY, Oct. 27, 2015 (HealthDay News) — The importance of thanking patients for coming to see you, the physician, is described in an essay published online in Medical Economics.
The article discusses implementation of AIDET in a large multispecialty group practice. The acronym stands for the action words that comprise the patient visit: acknowledge the patient and associated family; introduce yourself; describe what you are going to do; explain what you did and what will happen next; and finally, say thank you.
The author notes that despite having good scores overall for the patient experience, after making an effort to say thank you, his scores increased further, reaching 90 percent. As well as seeing an objective improvement, the author describes the feeling of having made a deeper connection to more of his patients, noting their smiles as they left the exam room.
“To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, you can please all of the patients some of the time, and some of them all of the time. But you can’t please all of the patients all of the time,” the author writes. “But you can try to thank all of them, all of the time, for coming to see you.”
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