Since most commercial spaces are rarely designed for medical use, it often seems like there is never enough office space in a doctor’s office. Many people often end up redesigning the rooms and trying to make it work on their own. Don’t have an office space specially designed for medical use? Here is how you can maximize space in your doctor’s office:
Use the exam rooms strategically
When you don’t know how to utilize the exam rooms properly, you often end up using up more space than necessary. It’s best to optimize the office space by assigning two to three rooms for one physician and their support staff. This is an adequate amount of rooms for the physician to take care of their patients efficiently. This group of exam rooms should be next to each other so that the staff can move around conveniently.
After you assign the spaces to the physician and support staff, turn any extra exam rooms into ‘flex rooms.’ The purpose of flex rooms is to be used when all of the exam rooms are in use, but you have other patients waiting. You can have other staff members see their patients in these flex rooms if necessary. When the practice is able to give fast service to the patients, the traffic in the waiting room will be relieved too. This strategy does not only help you optimize the use of the rooms that you have but also increase the efficiency of the doctors and support staff, resulting in higher patient satisfaction.
Think about where to put the supplies
Another big problem that many medical offices encounter is not having enough storage for all of the things that they need. You should not have items scattered all around your office. Before you make any decision, call for a meeting and brainstorm with everyone about the problem. Chances are that a few of your staff members will be able to come up with ideas and suggestions as to where all the necessary equipment should go.
Do you need a whole room for storage or will a closet suffice? One solution that you could consider is splitting one room into two areas: an exam area and a storage space. You can also buy carts to store frequently used supplies and wheel them wherever you want. Another solution is to keep supplies fully stocked in each exam room. However, this can only be done if the exam rooms in your office are big enough.
Spread out the workstations
Many people fail to design an effective doctor’s office because they are unable to deviate from the traditional medical office design. However, there are no sets of rules on how you should plan your doctor’s office. What most people do is designate the receptionist station to be the place where all of the paperwork goes.
Then, they specify an area for the nurses only and another for the practitioners. When five nurses and two doctors have to get paperwork at the same time, the receptionist area would then become extremely crowded, slowing the work process. This is not a smart way to use your limited space. Look around the office and try to spot the bottlenecks.
Most of the time, you will be able to see crowded areas where your office equipment is located – the photocopier, printer, fax machine, and telephone. It is recommended that you place the printer and photocopier in an area where both practitioners and nurses can access easily so they can manage the prescription papers without having to head to the front desk.
Clinicube® provides medical office space to chiropractors in NYC – get in touch today to see how we can help!