Want to find out what your practice looks like to the outside world and how well it fares in the increasingly important realm of customer service? Consider hiring a "mystery patient" to tell you what you need to know.
The practice of hiring mystery patients — a concept borrowed from the retail sector, in which specially trained "mystery shoppers" pose as customers for the purpose of evaluating a business' employees and service standards — is becoming increasingly common in healthcare. While hospitals have used mystery patients for many years, the concept began emerging in medical practices only about a decade ago.
Often, the mystery patient comes into the picture after patient satisfaction surveys yield undesirable results, when a merger or split has wreaked havoc, or when a practice wants to assess whether a training effort or new service standards are bearing fruit. Today, practices concerned about competitive positioning or simply seeking to improve processes are using the self-assessment approach to obtain objective, valuable information about what goes right — or wrong — when patients move through a typical visit cycle.
"There are a lot of things practices could fix for themselves, but they just don't see their [business] with the same kind of critical eye because everyone is so busy," says Andrea Eliscu, president of Medical Marketing Inc. of Orlando, Fla., and a former ICU nurse. A trained mystery patient can provide that objectivity, Eliscu says, as well as details on where and how the system breaks down or fails to provide solid — and friendly — service.
"I tell practice owners that the reason to do this is to see if everything you believe is happening when you're not with the patient, is the way it's designed to be," says Eliscu, author of the recently published book, Ready, Set, Market!
mystery patients — typically either specialized consultants or actual patients hired and trained by consultants — go through an entire visit cycle, from making an appointment and being examined to paying the bill and scheduling a follow-up. Their focus is on the service issues, rather than on clinical quality issues, although the two may overlap over the course of the visit. The best mystery-patient firms are able to not only assess the practice but also to provide a detailed report and, if necessary, a follow-up presentation and staff training.
How do you do?
Dermatology Specialists Inc. of Vista, Calif., uses mystery patients on a regular basis in its five north-county San Diego locations, with the primary objective of seeing whether the practice's "image" meets it own expectations.
"When you're evaluating staff and physicians with surveys, you get some information, but it's also nice to have someone who is savvy about what's appropriate in the office," says Jay Grossman, MD, president of the practice.
Grossman recently hired professional mystery patient Meryl Luallin, a partner in the San Diego consulting firm Sullivan/Luallin, to evaluate such factors as how well new patients were informed about office practices, how quickly the patient was moved from waiting room to exam room, and the physicians' demeanor and general bedside manner.
"We want everyone to treat our patients like they are their mother or grandmother —basically, the way we all want to be treated," Grossman says, adding that the benefits include the objectivity of the process and the opportunities for staff improvement it uncovers. "When [staff] receive feedback from somebody who has no vested interest other than to try to be impartial, then it's not the doctor saying it — it's from a patient's standpoint," he says. "It's supposed to be constructive, not destructive."
For example, Dermatology Specialists has used the process to help a physician figure out why he constantly ran behind — and to help the tardy doctor devise his own method for staying on track.
Go to the source
Practices use mystery patients to ferret out the source of a problem. Mary Maloney, vice president and chief educator at the Pittsburgh, Pa., marketing firm Adam Filippo & Associates, recalls a situation in which a Pennsylvania practice with serious service issues used a mystery patient to tie problems to their source: a dissatisfied receptionist.
"She was the practice's 'golden gatekeeper' — a position she'd held for 20-some years — and she was just miserable on the phone," Maloney says. It turned out that the woman was a competent, caring individual who still wanted to work at the practice — but she was very unhappy in what had become an unchallenging job for her.
