Playing Doctor

There's a physical therapy room in the basement of the building that I work. For all intents and purposes (a redundant phrase if there ever was one), it's a doctor's office.

A doctor's office (at least in the US) is almost always set up the same way. There's a waiting area. There's a reception desk. There are (almost always) women working, which means answering phone calls and occasionally responding to the people waiting.

Then, you are called to go inside, and if you're lucky, you get to see a doctor right away, but that kind of luck is rare. Instead, you're likely to wait for some period of time and then briefly see the doctor, and then be sent on your way.

I recently read an article where a doctor claims that it takes doctors something like 30 seconds to decide what is wrong with you. Imagine that! 30 seconds! Part of the problem is that a doctor has lots of patients, and so he can't spend hours trying to figure out what's wrong with you, but it seems sad that the diagnosis is made so quickly.

The other problem is that doctors, for the most part, think their patients are idiots. If they can't understand the highly technical terms they use, then they must be idiots. In this NPR segment, a patient had said that she felt like things were exploding in her body. Of course, they thought she was a bit nuts and went with their own diagnosis. It turns out that her body was occasionally releasing bursts of adrenaline (due to some malady), and that felt like explosions to her.

She only got treated correctly when she said that although she has had similar symptoms prior to this, this felt different, and it let the doctor think of other avenues.

But that's a topic for a different day.

Despite how little time doctors spend with you, you spend a bunch of time waiting for them. And there's not many new ideas on how to keep you occupied.

First, there's the question "why?". If I have an appointment at 8, why must I wait 30 minutes? Much like the airports, explanations are not forthcoming. Does the reception desk say "sorry, Dr. Smith came in late today, so we're all behind schedule, or the previous two patients came in 20 minutes late, so we're behind". Instead, apparently, no news is good news.

OK, so let's go beyond that. Fine. Patients and doctors can't show up on time, and you're expected to wait without explanation. What have the doctor's office done to make this wait more pleasant? Magazines? But why are all the magazines for women? I've never understood that. The worst places for that are barbers (er, hair stylists) where women's magazine abound. What about a news magazine? Or sports? I mean, come on.

But what else?

There's a complete lack of imagination when it comes to making patients, who are expected to wait, comfortable. Heck, this happens at restaurants too! You'd think restaurants would want to have too many seats than too few, though the cooks would also have to be increased to handle the load.

The next big change for customer service is handling ubiquitous waiting. How companies do this should lead to improved customer experience. Alas, it's sad how no one even bothers to try.