Physician Relations: I Need to Get the Doctor to See Me?

By: Kriss Barlow, RN, MBA

Talk about frustrating, you have good information that you want to share with a doctor and you “get through” the office staff to get quality time with the doctor.  We’ve all run up against those gatekeepers that make the job of the field staff so hard.  I suspect it is about prevention, validation and a plan.

Prevention: Great visits are done once the doctor suggests that they don’t need to meet with the liaison.  How do you sustain interest for those you currently see?  In my experience there are three essential elements.

1. A solid pre-call plan: You enter the practice prepared; you have a suggested agenda, things you’d like to learn and the offer to discuss the topics of interest to the doctor.
2. You manage your talk:  Whenever we can get the doctor actively engaged in sharing, she is more likely to feel engaged in the conversation.
3. Everyone in the office respects your role as their advocate: With planned topics of interest for the office staff and for the physician, the internal team is more likely to separate you from the traditional vendor meeting.

Validation: If the doctor gives up 15 minutes of their day to meet with you, there has to be some WIIFM (what’s in it for me) for him.  An easy way to remind them of this is a simple summary statement at the end of the meeting that says, here’s what you shared, here’s what I promised I would do and here is how we will track this information.  The other type of validation happens throughout your conversation and it’s simply to develop a technique to assure them of their wisdom in referring to you- or in simply meeting with you.  For some doctors this might be that you share, “I will be meeting with my CEO next week and this is certainly something she will be interested in learning…” For others it might be, “I spoke with the cardiologist and he commented that the patients you are referring always come so well prepared.”   If we are able to call out impact that has value for them we are more likely to continue to get meeting time.

Plan: We all know we should have good plans, but we are reminded of this when it does not go well.  Our shoot from the hip approach gets us in a jam and then we go back to planning.  And once we are “on the outs” it is really hard to earn the chance for the meeting with a gatekeeper.  Good plans include a pre-call plan of course, but it you know that gatekeepers are hard on you, take the time to craft a reply to the most common rejection.

In the event you are struggling, take the time to evaluate why, consider why the doctor should, craft a full scenario and find someone to role play the situation with you.  The job won’t work very well if you don’t work to overcome this so retool and try, try again!