TREATMENT BUSINESS

Your patients rely on you to keep them healthy. Wouldn’t it be nice if you had someone to rely on to keep your practice healthy? A physician call service may be the cure you are looking for.

A physician call service can do its part to take care of the health of your practice when your office is closed by providing seamless interactions between patients, doctors and the physician service. However, before you make a decision, be sure to consider these factors when choosing a physician service.

Highly skilled specialized agents — The skills of the agents answering your calls at a call service should be top notch. The doctors in your practice want — and need — accurate information about patients who call and efficient interactions with the agents at the after-hours physician call service. Remember, too, that you want your patients to feel confident they are in good hands when they reach an agent at the physician service. With the correct training, agents should be confident about handling medical calls. They should be well versed with correctly spelling and using the most common terms in your type of medical practice. While they need to maintain control of the call, they also should be sympathetic to the caller’s needs and be able to collect and relay accurate information to the on-call physician.

Confidentiality — Agents answering calls for a physician service should be specially trained to meet the privacy requirements of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). If you choose a physician service without HIPAA-trained personnel, you may run into legal ramifications. It’s worth taking the time to determine whether or not the agents have the right training. HIPAA privacy requirements also extend to patient information sent via electronic devices. That information must be encrypted, so be sure the physician service you are considering offers encrypted text messaging and/or e-mails to meet the letter of the law.

Customized solutions — A physician call service also should offer services that go beyond the standards of a general answering service. These customized solutions are designed to provide efficient, professional services to take care of both doctors’ and patients’ needs. A specialized physician’s service can offer very detailed on-call routing and scripting for both routine and emergency calls. This allows the agents to be thorough in evaluating callers’ concerns, while only interrupting your on-call doctor with truly urgent medical issues.

Disaster recovery plan — A specialized physician call service should understand the need for 24/7 redundancies to protect the service from electrical outages and phone line issues, as well as software and hardware failures. Solutions to ensure the call service is always available to answer your calls include back-up generators and off-site, back-up plans.

Evaluating a physician call service for your practice is really no different than evaluating a patient. Be sure to check out all the basics about the services provided and then look closely at the areas that could become a problem if you are not careful — like ensuring there are HIPAA-trained agents and a disaster recovery plan in place. Once you have all the necessary information, you can make the right decision to keep your practice in good health.

We need to seamlessly engage 24/7 initiatives through best-of-breed actionable, client-facing items and proactively create 24/365 niche markets through backward-compatible, future-proof enterprise-wide e-services without turnkey systems.”

Does the above sentence sound like something that you’ve heard in a meeting recently? Actually, it comes from an on-line random corporate jargon generator which simply puts together the silliest things that are said within corporations and makes them into sentences that could be spoken by any CEO.

In these difficult and recessionary times, as people are changing industries frequently, it is absolutely essential to eliminate jargon, circumlocutions and other corporate double-speak from your interviewing vocabulary.

One good exercise is to explain, as if to a second grader, what you do for a living. Don’t use any jargon, corporate “buzzwords” or other words that a second grader would not understand. If you cannot do this, you truly do not know what you do for a living.

It is continually amazing to me and my colleagues how many of our executive clients cannot or will not do this simple exercise. Jargon is a killer of executive interviews. Here’s why:

• Jargon doesn’t necessarily have the same meaning from company to company. If the “corporate speak” at one firm is different from that at another, you may be saying something totally inappropriate or unintelligible in your interview. I often think of when I play with my daughter’s cat and “meow” at it. Sometimes the cat will give me a profoundly dirty look. Since I don’t actually speak “cat,” I probably just insulted its intelligence or fur coat or something. Ditto with “corporate speak.” I’ve seen too many executives get in real interview trouble from using jargon.

• Likewise, jargon does not necessarily retain the same meaning from industry to industry. Even within industries, different branches of the same industry may use jargon and even technical definitions differently. Misusing jargon is very easy to do when switching industries.

• Jargon is way to show that you’re “in the club” of the corporation for which you’re working. Only you’re not anymore. You’re trying to get into a different “club,” now. But you can’t use their jargon until you’ve been admitted to the club. If you try they may turn on you and tear you to shreds. Such is human nature.

• Jargon often covers ignorance. As the above jargon that sounds very managerial shows, even a complete idiot (a computer has no intelligence) can generate jargon. Only someone who truly knows his or her stuff can explain complex material in simple language. Employers have caught on to this, and many are downgrading their evaluations of those who speak jargon through the interview.

• Even something that isn’t technically jargon can be a shield against lack of understanding of what a job really does. For example, many people say they want to do “operations.” “Operations” has many meanings within the corporate world, yet some people cannot describe what they want to do without using the word “operations.” If you can’t describe what it is without using the word, you don’t know what it is.

So you spent all that money for calendar printing, but you cannot seem to be able to sell them. Whether for true financial profit, or just printing calendars for fundraising, the reasons why your calendars are failing to sell are typically all the same. There are five major reasons why this is happening. Let me explain to you each of these reasons so that you can correct your next batch of color calendars and have them more readily sold at an audience.

1. The theme is not appealing to the market.

The most basic reason why your color calendars are not selling is because they are not as appealing as you may think. A set of good images for each of the months in your sales calendars are typically no enough. Those images must have a very directed and interesting theme for them to look significant enough to buy for most people. You might actually need to do some basic market research on your target market so that you will know which kinds of themes will be most appealing to them. Without that research, you will be basically printing blind, not knowing if your designs are good enough to be sold. So make sure you do that particular market research homework or fail at selling color calendars because of the lack of an appealing theme.

2. No enticing or uniquely decorative pictures.

Now, sometimes it might just be the images. Those calendar images might look good for the most part, but when thrown altogether and used for decoration, they might not look as good as you would think. This lack of enticing or uniquely decorative images can be the cause why people just ignore and do not buy your calendars. So if you are an amateur at photography and graphic design, you may not want to do the calendar images yourself. Try to hire the best photographer and layout artist that you can so that your custom calendars and its images look as good and as decorative as possible. This will help increase your chances of success in selling calendars.

3. Apparent lack of printing quality.

People always look for quality things to buy. If you decided to cheapen up your calendar printing with bad paper materials then you will probably not be able to attract a lot of those people looking for quality calendars. So even though it might be hard, you should try to spend as much as you can in calendar printing quality. Great looking paper materials with great inks will always turn out better color calendars that sell. Make sure you remember this.

4. Tough calendar competition.

Most of us enjoy a regular trip to the local pub to catch up with friends, enjoy fine beverages and de-stress the week away on a comfy leather sofa or bar stool. Little do we give much thought to the history of the pub and why our friendly waterhole can be the hub of the community and a pillar of British culture. As Samuel Johnson puts it so eloquently, ”There is nothing which has yet been contrived by man, by which so much happiness is produced as a good tavern or inn.”

The first pubs can be dated back to Roman times where people gathered to plan business transactions and barter with the help of a heady mix of wine and meats or cheese. Nevertheless, it wasn’t until the Anglo Saxon period that pubs became a British stalwart, with the introduction of alehouses. These establishments quickly became popular, acting as places for the community to gather, gossip and arrange work. As soon as 965AD alehouses were so popular that King Edgar ruled that there should only be one per community. As pubs developed, local lord’s of the manor and gentry began running them as inns, using aristocratic names for their establishments.

The popularity and community feel of these pubs never dwindled and by the 18th century drinking establishments were rife. The introduction of gin meant that thousands of gin-shops opened up throughout London and the UK as a whole. Coaching inns were used widely at this time, until the introduction of the railways as the most efficient form of transport in the 19th century. Nevertheless, the pub was not beaten and simply diversified into large, grand buildings in the centre of our towns and cities. This period also saw the introduction of licensing laws, regulating the sale of alcohol and the dominance of the brewery which shape the tiered house system we see today.

Most pubs are owned by companies such as Whitbread or Fullers, with few completely independent establishments existing, particularly in urban areas. However, the draw of the pub has not waned with many places growing a name for themselves as gastropubs, drawing visitors from long distances to sample fine wine and cuisine. Whilst such pubs aim at attracting the more sophisticated consumer, small local pubs still exist to serve local communities as empowering places to lift spirits and plan adventures.