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COPYRIGHT 2005 Manisses Communications Group, Inc.
The group practice was located in an affluent suburb of Baltimore. Carefully lit, the office was furnished in fine rosewood, and obviously designed with an upscale clientele in mind.
Yet as clients walked in and approached the receptionist's impeccably polished desk, they were greeted with a handwritten sign, obviously the product of a frustrated billing manager: "PAYMENT EXPECTED IN FULL AT TIME OF DELIVERY!" was scrawled in angry letters.
"A version of that occurs in a lot of places we go. It just immediately says kind of the wrong thing," says Steve Schafer, CEO of Schafer Consulting in Sewickley, PA. "The cardiologist doesn't have that in his office. If he did, you'd say, 'I don't know about this.'"
The proliferation of the handwritten sign is just one small glitch that can ruin an otherwise flawless presentation and damage an organization's image in the eyes of its clients. Yet behavioral health, perhaps more than other health care fields, seems rife with such problems.
They're easy to correct, and practice management experts say it's well worth the effort to notice such details--because you can bet your clients do.
Image is everything
For all the years Joan Betzold has worked in behavioral health as a consultant, she continues to run into behavioral health providers that struggle with the most basic issues of running a business and maintaining professionalism.
"It just never ceases to amaze me that people don't understand how to run businesses....
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