• E-mail
• Print
• RSS

Mystery shoppers keep tabs on patient satisfaction

Quality Improvement Monitor, March 23, 2007

Long a staple in the retail industry, mystery shopping has made the leap to the hospital setting where faux patients are secretly taking stock of customer service.

Driving the charge is the increased emphasis on patient satisfaction, a focus that will likely become more prominent as hospitals start reporting on the Hospital-Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) later this year. Those data will be unveiled to the public in late 2007.

Some hospitals that are heading into the new era of transparency and HCAHPS already have a running head start.

CentraState Medical Center in Freehold, NJ, began its push to improve patient satisfaction back in 1999 when it was in the eighth percentile.

One year later, it signed up with Press Ganey with a goal to climb to the 90th percentile by 2003, an objective it reached and has since sustained. In 2004, CentraState received an award from Press Ganey for being one of its success stories.

"Once we put the major pieces in play [and] set the framework for changing culture, then we started looking at finer ways to look for more subtle things," says Ellen Gutter, MA, director of patient and resident satisfaction at CentraState. That's when the facility began exploring the concept of mystery shopping.

For more information, click here http://www.hcpro.com/content/67543.cfm

• E-mail to a Colleague
• Print
• RSS
• Archive