How to woo your patients: 4 tips for creating a unique service culture in radiology

To thrive in today’s healthcare industry, radiologists are often looking for ways to set themselves apart and showcare their value to patient care. According to Tina Rudisill and Gail Schwartz of TRG Marketing Works in York, Penn., the best way to stand out is to “woo” your patients, impressing them with both the quality of your service and an overall positive experience.

Rudisill, owner and president of TRG Marketing Works, and Schwartz, vice president of the company’s healthcare division, spoke with RadiologyBusiness.com about the power of wooing your patients. The key, they said, is establishing a unique service culture.

“We work really hard to talk about culture first,” Schwartz said. “So many radiology groups want to run to market with a message that’s so undefined and so undifferentiated, and in my opinion, it’s lipstick on a pig. If you really want to go to market with a message that’s powerful, this is the foundation.”

The unique service culture is so significant in healthcare, Rudisill and Schwartz explained, because most patients don’t understand enough to question the physician. And if clinical details aren’t driving a patient’s decision-making, you have to impress them with every other detail of their experience.

“It really starts with the moment they first interact with an organization,” Rudisill said. “That might be through the phone, it might be face to face when they walk in the office for the first time. What we teach and coach is that those interactions can be as positive or detrimental to the experience as the experience with the clinician. In radiology, probably even more so, because they rarely see the doctor.”

Rudisill and Schwartz shared four tips to help leaders within radiology woo their patients.

1. Take a walk in the park

To create a unique service culture, Rudisill and Schwartz believe you must first surround yourself with the right people.

Rudisill calls it “taking a walk in the park.” You sit down and think about what you would do with your staff if you could completely restart your radiology practice or department from scratch. Who would you keep? Who would you be unsure of?

You then break the staff down into two categories. If an individual is both a “skill match” and a “culture match,” they fall into the “keep” column. If they don’t have the right skills or they don’t understand and appreciate the office’s culture, they fall into the “question mark” column.

If an employee is a question mark, Rudisill says, they should get six months—no longer—to change. And if they fail to rise to the challenge, then they should no longer be on staff.

“The responsibility of leadership is to figure out, ‘How do we coach, teach and mentor those ‘question marks’ so that, in six months, we can either move them to the ‘keep’ list or we can move them the heck out?” Rudisill said.

According to Rudisill, seniority can’t be used as a reason to keep employees on staff.  

“If someone’s been there for two hours or 22 years, you can’t continue to excuse behavior just because of tenure,” Rudisill said. “If they don’t fit the culture, if they’re consistently a bad apple for whatever reason, then I don’t care if they’re brilliant ... if they don’t fit the culture, they can’t be there. You can’t have a culture with those that are consistently looking for ways to derail it.”

2. Know your shared purpose

Rudisill and Schwartz say every radiology practice or department should define its shared purpose. This keeps everyone on the same page, and helps define both the staff’s core values and its unique service culture.

Schwartz said standard mission statements are often ineffective.

“Hospitals and even practices have mission and vision statements, but they all sound alike,” Schwartz said. “It would be hard at the front desk to pick it up and say, ‘Wow, this resonates with me, and I know how I should treat my patients and colleagues because of it.’”

When drafting their group’s shared purpose, there are certain questions Rudisill and Schwartz say leaders must consider. For example, what can the staff and its customers work on together? What does the practice or department stand for?

“It’s really something that can be heartfelt and that, regardless of whether you are the CEO or somebody at the front desk, you know what that means to you,” Schwartz said.

The shared purpose does not necessarily have to be long. Rudisill pointed to the Ritz Carlton’s shared purpose as an ideal example, and it’s just one simple sentence: “We are ladies and gentlemen serving ladies and gentlemen.”

3. Adapt to your situation

Schwartz said establishing a unique service culture may seem easier for radiologists at an imaging center as opposed to those working out of a hospital, but those in the hospital setting can’t use it as an excuse.

“What we do is encourage them to look at mapping the process for a patient,” Schwartz said. “What’s that first touch point? What could they do different or better?”

Rudisill added that, if anything, those in a hospital setting should feel even more pressure to adapt. Patients are beginning to notice that things tend to be more expensive at a hospital than at an imaging center, so they will walk in the door with adjusted expectations

“It’s kind of like a hotel room,” Rudisill said. “If I pay $50 for a hotel room, I have this expectation, but if I paid $2,000 for a hotel room, my expectations just went up.”

In addition, radiologists at hospitals must be as visible as possible and avoid being viewed as just a commodity.

“The only way to stop from being a commodity is to start to figure out ways to build relationships with your patients and rebuild relationships with your referring community,” Rudisill said.

4. Focus on the benefits, not the costs

If any leaders are unsure about going that extra mile, Schwartz said the numerous benefits outweigh any additional costs. Creating that unique service culture can improve systems, engage employees, increase efficiency, lower operating costs and help improve customer satisfaction. That improved customer satisfaction, Schwartz pointed out, leads to more customers and more revenue.

“If you get me in there and you do a really good job, you’ve probably captured me and my entire family, so that’s potential revenue,” Schwartz said. “If you don’t do a good job, I’m going to take my business elsewhere. How do you put real numbers to that? That gets a little tricky, but at the end of the day, it doesn’t really cost a whole lot more to be nice to people.”