We built our office and grew our practice. Now, after several years of searching, we finally found the perfect physician to join our still growing practice. Adding her to the practice opened up a new specialty and took the pressure off our long waiting list. It was wonderful, until the problems started. No, we didn’t uncover some horrible dark side to our new partner. To the contrary, patients and staff alike love her. In fact, that’s what caused the problem. She rapidly built up a loyal following of patients and referring physicians.
As her clinic grew, the strain on the infrastructure began to show. We addressed numerous issues with the office flow, from the room waiting room, through medical assistant check-in, to follow-up scheduling. One problem, however, continued to grow—our parking lot.
Patients routinely complained about parking. They had trouble finding a handicapped parking space. They had trouble walking a long way to the door. Sometimes they had to circle the parking lot. On a few occasions, they were even late for their appointments because they were unable to find a parking space.
The overall crowding in the parking lot was an obvious problem. The solution proved to be much less obvious.
First, we considered buying the adjacent vacant lot to build an additional parking area. After sinking untold hours into negotiating with the seller and spending money on civil engineering assessments, the total cost of the project was projected to exceed $1 million. Not only did we discover this was a bad idea, we learned how to think through a problem before spending money on it. Along the way, we discovered every aspect of the clinic and staff can impact the user experience. As crazy as it sounds, providing exceptional care can easily be overwhelmed by the annoyance of having trouble finding a parking space.
We formed a group including staff, administration and physicians to address this and similar problems. A number of potential solutions were proposed ranging from expanding office hours to opening on Saturdays to remote parking for staff, among others. A valet parking system was suggested by one practice administrator in an online forum. We considered this and in fact are still considering adding this as a feature for our clinic.
After reviewing all of the pros and cons of the potential solutions, we discovered that we could stagger the physician and clinic schedules, coordinate days off, and schedule specific lunchtimes to alleviate the pressures on the parking lot and the front office staff. Making these simple and obviously very inexpensive changes provided the answer, at least thus far. Obviously, we are working at or near capacity and will likely have to reassess this problem in the future. There are many take-home points from this experience. First, everything is connected—the administrative task of scheduling and the physical parameters of your building are connected to practice growth and vice versa. More importantly, simple and cost-effective solutions can be found and explored before money is invested. By looking at where and when different stakeholders parked in the lot, we found ways to meet patient’s needs, improve their experience, and further build their loyalty to the practice.
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