Section by: Dr. Tori Hudson

It's one thing to employ strategies to build your practice with new patients - websites, signage, advertisements, community lectures, article placement in local publications, networking with organizations and other allied health care providers, and more. It's quite another to work well with the patients you are seeing, keep these patients you have seen, and assure appropriate follow-up appointments. While my thoughts here are nothing short of fundamental, I think they still deserve mentioning to remind us of the importance of the basics of patient follow-up.

It all starts with connection/relationship, responsibility/reliability and clinical knowledge. A lapse in any one of these areas will leave your patients finding someone else that meets these standards. I have been in practice for almost 30 years, and continue to grow as a physician, personally and intellectually, to continuously evolve in these areas.

A few of my favorite tips for excelling in these areas:

• Greet the patient in the waiting room.
• Find ways to connect and empathize. Also, support those patients for whom it is not easy to do so, is a kind of physician's spiritual practice of sorts.
• Fine tune habits and office practices to assure a level of responsibility and reliability in returning phone calls, informing the patient about lab results, following up on promised conversations, and charting well enough to know both clinical and personal things about them at the follow-up visit.
• Pay attention, be perceptive, and do not make assumptions.
• Do what you say you are going to do. For example, call them after their surgery, call them with lab results, call their doctor and then get back to them, send an article, send a nutritional supplement that we didn't have in stock, etc.
• Know your stuff. And when you don't, be sure that you become informed, find someone to consult with who does know, or refer the patient to the appropriate person.
• Speak/write clear instructions. Go over the treatment plan clearly and repeat key points.
• Be clear about when to follow-up: verbally in the office/exam room or writing on their service summary or treatment sheet. Also, let the receptionist know (I write it on the service summary for them to see.)
• Walk them out to the waiting room and say good-bye.
• Have fun; even a seriously ill patient can still laugh and appreciates humor.