Medical Mystery Shopping: the difference between in-house shoppers and external shoppers
With the holidays soon approaching, we gather with our friends and family to celebrate. While enjoying the festivities, disasters are inevitable, like that red wine stain on your beautiful beige carpet. It’s late when you discover it, so you say to yourself, “I’ll call the carpet cleaner in the morning,” and push it off until tomorrow. You make an attempt to call the carpet cleaners, but you know this time of year they’re too busy. So you put it off for a week, and then another week after that. Eventually, the stain has been there so long it is no longer a significant priority. You learn to live with the stain, by covering it up with rugs, strategically moving the furniture, or simply ignoring it. To visitors the stain is obvious, but they won’t say anything about it for fear it might offend you.
Medical mystery shoppers hired externally are the ideal visitors because they are trained to announce the stains that are obvious to them. Internal shoppers are already familiar with the stains. Practices may not realize the significant difference between internal and external mystery shopping evaluations. Many practices make an attempt to evaluate their practice by giving surveys to patients or utilizing in-house mystery shoppers. Accurate feedback is difficult to obtain by implementing patient surveys because typically those who participate in the surveys are extremely unsatisfied or extremely satisfied. Therefore, it is impossible to get unbiased results because data is measured at the extreme level instead of the standard level of satisfaction. Surveys might give you the data that you think you want, but not the true data you need.
In-house shoppers are also unreliable when it comes to the accuracy of evaluations because typically they work for the healthcare system they are shopping, which means they will fail to see the little things that really matter. They will overlook the wine stains because they’ve become accustomed to them. The unnecessary paperwork will be overlooked because that is how the paperwork has been handled for years, and it seems right because that’s what everyone has done in the past within that healthcare system or practice. In-house shoppers are accustomed to those operations and that atmosphere. They also tend to be biased and won’t want to provide information that will later cause conflict in their work place environment because of the blame game that comes along with negative shopper comments from within.
External medical mystery shoppers are the best tools to evaluate what is really going on in your practice or network of practices. External shoppers provide completely unbiased, measurable data rather than paragraphs of comments in-house shoppers typically report. And of course, the hardest part of receiving this data is knowing what to do with it. How do you evaluate the data and how do you use the data to make changes to improve your patients’ experiences? The medical mystery shopping programs at (e)Merge include data analysis, to find out what the data really means, as well as strategies for improvement, so the practices can actually see results.
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