Two Roles

Your role is important because you are often that gatekeeper. In many practices, the front desk area is the hottest seat in the house. In fact, we tend to see that position as the highest turnover within practices, because not everybody can do what you do. It requires attention to detail, great communication skills, and great organizational skills. In order for you to be successful at patient reception, it's important that you have an overall understanding of the entire operation of the practice, because you will be handling many patients as well as business care responsibilities as well as communication, whether it be between the patient, your team, or the doctor. We’ll go over this more in the patient production cycle, course four. 

Now, I would like to pause for a moment and note that we do advocate that there are two roles that are removed from the patient reception/patient reception coordinator role. The first would be we advocate there is a separate patient communications facilitator. this individual will own that schedule and they'll be responsible for recall. 

Secondly, we advocate that you remove the check out from the front desk area. In a perfect world, we would have our Opticians have the tools and the ability to check on our patient in optical or we would have a separate check out area for our patients. This is important because if we have our patients funneling all through to one location it can cause bottleneck and it can have a negative impact on that patient experience as well as your ability to keep that smile on your face. Now, in some practices, this is not possible or we have a smaller team and you may be wearing multiple hats. You’re doing check in, check out, scheduling, confirmations, insurance, a whole gamut of responsibilities. So, when this is happening, it's essential that you have the systems in place and that you work together and communicate together as a team.