The cost of office equipment

Acceptable overhead

Patient satisfaction survey

• How would you rate the length of time you spent waiting in the office? (Excellent, Very Good, Good, Fair or Poor),

• How would you rate the amount of time you spent with the doctor? (Excellent, Very Good, Good, Fair or Poor),

• How would you rate your satisfaction with the length of time you waited to get your appointment today? (Excellent, Very Good, Good, Fair or Poor),

• Did you get the help that you expected from today's visit? (More than what I expected, What I expected, Less than what I expected, Not sure).

Every other month, I print out 10 copies of the survey, put them onto a clipboard with a pen and place them on one of the patient chairs in my exam room. At the conclusion of each of the next 10 visits, I ask the patient to take a moment to fill out the survey and put it into a large manila envelope. Then I tally the responses and put them into a spreadsheet program that allows me to graph the results over time. The tallying and graphing take about 10 minutes. No single data point says very much, but the trend over time is telling. This data is just enough to tell me how I'm doing in very general terms (think of it like taking a patient's temperature – if the measurement is off target, it is time to delve).