What do your patients expect of you and your practice? Some express their expectations in full voice, while others tell you in a whisper -- or not at all. In this issue of The Healthcare Collaborator, we'll show you how to help patients open up, determine their underlying wants and needs, influence patients with unreasonable or inappropriate demands, and increase patient satisfaction by meeting their expectations more successfully. Here's a preview:

• Manage patient expectations more successfully by the way you communicate, as explained in an excellent Featured Interview with nationally known trainer and consultant Joanne Desmond, president of Desmond Medical Communications and coauthor of Communicating With Today's Patient: Essentials to Save Time, Decrease Risk, and Increase Patient Compliance.
  
  
• Which unvoiced desires are most prevalent? How can you encourage patients to express their needs before, during, and after office visits? Find out in Strategy Center.
  
  
• Improve your ability to decipher and address patients' underlying expectations, with great advice from Beth Lown, MD, president-elect of the American Academy on Physician and Patient and clinical instructor in medicine at Harvard Medical School, in this month's Success Story.
  
  
• What influences the development and expression of patient expectations? Get the results of cutting-edge research on this topic from Richard Kravitz, MD, professor of medicine and director of the Center for Research in Primary Care at the University of California at Davis, in Question of the Month.
  
  
• How can you deal more effectively with patient demands? See Difficult Situations for a stellar step-by-step plan suggested by Thomas Campbell, MD, interim chair of the Department of Family Medicine at the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry in Rochester, New York.
  
  
• Conduct a 60-minute workshop built around four thought-provoking case studies with the curriculum in Training Tips.
  
  
• See the Bookstore for our top picks on this exciting topic!
  

Download the complete issue.