The Path to Successful Care Starts With Patient Relationships

The Path to Successful Care Starts With Patient Relationships 

Every doctor has had a patient who just wouldn’t listen. A patient that will not, or cannot, believe a diagnosis, for instance, or a patient who takes medication improperly, or a patient who refuses to quit smoking or stop overeating. And what about the patients who just don’t show up?

Problem patients illustrate one of the fundamental foundations of good medical care: trust. 

A patient needs to trust his or her doctor to provide excellent care, and a doctor needs to trust his or her patient to take the prescribed actions to assist their own care. This relationship between the doctor and the patient is fundamental to good care. But it’s not entirely within the doctor’s control!

You can’t build patient relationships alone

A physician can do everything right, medically speaking, and still end up with a patient who refuses to cooperate. Upon closer examination, this isn’t that surprising: after all, (in most cases) only one of these two people went to medical school. How should a patient know that his or her doctor is actually doing the right thing?

This is why good doctors also need to build trust with their patients the old-fashioned way. This isn’t just about results (on the patient’s first visit, there aren’t any results). It’s about a relationship.

What about a doctor who is has both boundless medical talent, and a perfect bedside manner? Is he or she all set? No, not yet. Because before a patient even meets his or her doctor, that patient has dealt with the doctor’s office and staff. This is where trust begins: with this administrative work that has nothing to do with the medical side of things. 

The importance of a good patient management system 

Physicians train for years to be doctors. They don’t train for years to learn when to remind patients to honor existing appointments or make new ones. They learn how to track patients’ recoveries and pain, not their satisfaction with the service at the doctor’s office. Doctors are medical professionals, not customer service professionals!

This is why it makes sense for doctors to partner with experts to get the perfect patient management systems. Companies like SolutionReach offer tools for everything from appointment reminders to patient education. The concept is simple: doctors get to keep being doctors, while experts in things like patient satisfaction tracking take care of what they do best.

With the right tools in place, doctors can trust that they’re on firm ground with their patient relationships. That leaves doctors free to focus on actual care needs and in-person patient relationships, rather than administrative tasks and other small details. Doctors need to be able to take these fundamental things for granted when they meet a patient - and with the right tools, they can.