A feedback tool to improve physician-medical assistant communication.

Medical assistants (MAs) have always been vital to the effective operation of our primary care clinic. Each physician in our university-based, hospital-run clinic has an assigned MA, and a good MA can make a clinic day run smoothly. One who is not efficient or does not understand the physician’s work process, however, can slow down the whole clinic and make a workday very frustrating. Surprisingly, given the importance of the physician-MA dyad, we had no structured process for individuals in these roles to provide feedback to one another. This was due, in part, to unaligned reporting structures. Physicians are employed by the school of medicine while MAs are employed by the hospital that owns the clinic. The clinic supervisor, who manages the MAs and reports to the hospital, would request feedback regarding the MAs’ job performance annually, but rarely would there be face-toface feedback between the MAs and the physicians. ➤