Customer service is another focus at the university. If patients or parents feel better about their visits – not just with the doctor, but from their appointment phone calls right through to their checkouts – they are more likely to stick with treatments.
Dr. Ellis leads a service excellence program to train physicians, nurses, and ancillary staff to ensure that visits go well and patient needs are met. It’s “similar to what you might find in a fancy hotel chain,” and has proven itself with high patient satisfaction scores, he said.
A thorough history is part of good customer service. One thing to pay attention to is calcium channel blocker and thiazide use in older patients.
Both can cause chronic eczematous eruptions that look like atopic dermatitis, and elderly people might have been on the drugs for so long that the relationship with skin problems is easy to miss.
“If you haven’t contemplated particularly calcium channel blockers as a potential cause, you might not give patients a chance to go off them for a while to see if it helps,” he said.
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Dr. Ellis is a consultant for Celgene, Ferndale, Otsuka, and Johnson & Johnson.