My unfavorite newspaper (see comments under this post), The NY Times featured an article on Nov 30th that made many news wires entitled When the Doctor is in But You Wish He Weren’t.  It includes many examples of unruly customer service from a variety of specialists including orthopedics.  Lest we be too critical of physician practices, we should first examine our own practices and examine our service.  This article really highlights a significant uprising in consumer driven healthcare including the trend toward report cards like RateMD’s which now have over 18,000 doctors in their database.  The question for all of us is are we ready for the same uprising in physical therapy?

They also site the implications on falling short in patient satisfaction surveys.  Although I believe a better measurement is engagement or customer loyalty, these efforts are indeed laudable.

I believe that the best outcome for a patient is the combination of clinical excellence and customer service.  Patients truly value the “service” aspect of care and because EBP is based in conjunction with patient values, we need to increase our efforts towards meeting them.  Thoughts?

Larry