AIDET® stands for Acknowledge, Introduce, Duration, Explanation and Thank You and is a tool for improving patient communication in urgent care settings.
Unlike medical specialists who typically get their patients through referrals from other physicians, urgent care centers appeal directly to consumer decision makers through high-visibility retail locations with strong signage, adjacencies to popular grocery and big box retailers, conventional advertising like radio and direct mail, and Internet SEO/SEM efforts. Because self-triaging consumers typically choose urgent care on their own, it’s critical for a center’s long term success that patients have the quality of experience that not only leads them to return to the center for services themselves, but to tell others to do likewise. A center simply cannot be successful without loyal, repeat patients who spread positive word-of-mouth in the community.
One mechanism we have learned from our clients in increasing patient satisfaction is AIDET®, which is a framework for urgent care staff to communicate with patients and each other. AIDET® stands for Acknowledge, Introduce, Duration, Explanation and Thank You:
When used properly, AIDET® can give an urgent care center’s providers and staff the guidance needed to effectively address any problems that occur during a patient’s visit. While the acronym is easy to remember, centers find the greatest success when training via role-playing exercises in which providers and staff mimic patient interactions to demonstrate how AIDET® is applied in the day-to-day workflow.
Practice Velocity is committed to helping urgent care centers succeed with its award-winning electronic medical record (EMR) that incorporates “best practice” processes that assure patients are seen quickly, that documentation is thorough, and that coding is optimized according to the documentation. Using Chartlet, the most frequent urgent care presentations can be charted in under a minute, thus maximizing the number of patients a provider can see each hour and reducing patient time in center. A fully integrated practice management solution assures seamless billing, maximizing reimbursement and collections.
The AIDET® communication framework is a registered trademark of Studer Group.
Alan A. Ayers, MBA, MAcc, Vice President of Strategic Initiatives
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