As we head into an era of “Pay for Performance” and “Personalized Care” (both of which mostly mean it’s time to shop around and pay your own way), savvy clinics have employed mystery shoppers: individuals posing as patients who are actually paid to evaluate their experience. Healthcare managers say the practice has paid off…
When James Loden, an ophthalmologist, recently peered into a patient’s eyes, he was evaluating her for laser surgery to correct her vision. But her eyes were sharp enough to have already scanned Dr. Loden’s Nashville, Tenn., office, noting a small water stain on the ceiling in the hallway, the technician’s missing name tag, and that exactly 55 minutes elapsed between when she came in the door and when she was seen.
After her appointment, she sat in her car and jotted down notes for her employer, Las Vegas-based Examine Your Practice, which then reported back to Dr. Loden on the experience.
“Perception is reality,” says Dr. Loden, who has made a number of changes in his practice based on reports from mystery shoppers. “The patient’s perception is all that really matters.”
Health-care facilities that use mystery shoppers say the reports have led to a number of changes in the patient experience, including improved estimates of wait times, better explanations of medical procedures, extended hours for hospital administration workers, escorts for patients who have gotten lost, and even less-stressful programming on the television in the waiting room.
To remember details while remaining undercover, shoppers resort to hiding tape recorders in their bags, jotting details down in appointment books or crosswords, and going to bathrooms to take notes.
Observations can range from the minor to the serious. Courtney Lee once posed as an uninsured patient for 24 hours on an inpatient unit at a Midwestern hospital for Indianapolis-based Perception Strategies mystery-shopping service. When she asked for an additional pillow, she says a nurse said to her, “Why don’t you have your husband or friend get you one from the dollar store?”
Interesting to see clinics opening up to this whole concept of “customer service.” Next thing you know they’ll be improving the food…
More from the Wall Street Journal‘s Startup Journal…
MIT’s Technology Review has an 
Hostility detector. . .hmmm. . . I hope this can tell the difference between hostility aimed at airport personnel (armed with GEDs) and terrorist related hostility.
The Journal of 
A typical TransPharma Medical RF-MicroChannel microelectrode array incorporates hundreds of microelectrodes, so that many parallel channels are created through the skin within a few seconds. This covers less than 1% of the total treated surface area…
Engineers from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, in cooperation with Harvard Medical School, Albany Medical Center, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, are developing a novel type of surgical simulator for surgeons training in minimally invasive surgery. The haptics (i.e. sense of touch) used in the simulator are based on a computerized algorithm called Point-Associated Finite Field:
To overcome these barriers, De’s group has developed a new computational tool called the Point-Associated Finite Field (PAFF) approach, which models human tissue as a collection of particles with distinct, overlapping zones of influence that produce coordinated, elastic movements. A single point in space models each spot, while its relationship to nearby points is determined by the equations of physics. The localized points migrate along with the tip of the virtual instrument, much like a roving swarm of bees.
