Baird Group Research
Healthcare mystery shopping, patient focus groups and interviews help leaders understand the patient experience by offering insights that you can’t otherwise achieve.
Patient satisfaction surveys (including HCAHPS) tell you how patients rate you, but they don’t explain the “why” behind the scores. We not only reveal the “why,”, but we also give practical solutions for improvement.
While we are not a survey company, we uncover vital consumer perceptions that help you understand and improve the experiences.
You pose the problem, and we design the best methodology to reveal the most meaningful data. We do this by conducting:
- Focus groups – We do a deep-dive into how people truly feel about their experiences with your healthcare organization through carefully curated focus groups comprised of:
- Consumers
- Patients
- Employees
- In-depth interviews – The best way to get to know your customers is by listening to them. Through our interviews, we learn what makes them tick and what ticks them off.
- Mystery shopping – Learn how your employees interact with patients and other members of the public when you’re not looking.
- Gap Analysis – Data is only useful when you apply it to real-life solutions. We use the information gathered to identify where your gaps in service are and how you can close them.
Healthcare Mystery Shopping Services
Mystery shopping is a type of observational research.
Baird Group specializes in mystery shopping, which involves trained observers seeking medical services, evaluating their experiences and revealing strengths and opportunities. This is a method of evaluating employees that is much more targeted than surveys.f The type of mystery shopping (also known as secret shopping) conducted depends on the service line being assessed and what service problems you are trying to solve. We have methods applied in inpatient and outpatient settings that can ultimately improve HCAHPS scores.
Mystery shopping evaluates:
- Virtual Visit Experience – How easy is it for patients to access virtual visit options? How do patients evaluate the quality of virtual patient visits?
- Access issues – Can patients get appointments in a timely fashion? How are they treated when they seek appointments? What is the hassle-factor?
- Customer service – How are patients and potential patients treated? What impresses or disappoints them? Based on their experience, will they return or recommend?
- Service behaviors – You’ve done the training and set the expectations. Now it’s time to validate the standards in action. Are staff following the standards? Who are your stars?
- Overall experience with people, processes and environment – Consumers make decisions based on how they feel about their experience. Mystery shoppers document both facts and feelings to paint a realistic picture of your organization through the consumers’ eyes.
- The “little” things – Beyond the ordinary levels of service, how do patients feel when they leave your facility? Did the employees they encountered make an extra effort to exceed their expectations?
While healthcare mystery shopping certainly can reveal shortcomings, remember that it also can show you which staff members are following protocols every day. Once you have that information, you have the opportunity to reward those employees. Ultimately, this can help you retain the kinds of employees you want to have in your company and achieve the HCAHPS scores you desire.
What QHPs need to know about Secret Shopping
Get ready for the 2025 CMS appointment access mandate.
The Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has mandated secret shopping beginning January 1, 2025.
All qualified health plans (QHP) issuers in the Federally Facilitated Exchanges are required to conduct secret shopping to assess appointment wait times (AWT). Data must be collected between January 1, 2025 and May 31, 2025. QHPS must test a statistically significant sample of primary care and behavioral health providers.
- Primary Care – within 15 days
- Behavioral Health – within 10 days
Why Baird Group for Your CMS Secret Shopping?
Baird Group has been conducting medical mystery shopping (secret shopping) for over two decades for healthcare systems and payers throughout the United States. Our most recent white paper analyses over 13,000 calls to medical practices to assess appointment access. Benefits of our experience includes:
- Comprehensive library of over 2000 specialty-specific scenarios
- Thousands of experienced mystery shoppers
- Dedicated, experience project managers
- Proven methodology that relieves our clients of administrative burden
- Easy-to-use software with clear data dashboards
- Proactive method for avoiding duplicate calls to providers in multiple plans and networks (decreases unnecessary burden on medical practice staff)
- Multi-level quality assurance measures guarantee accurate reporting
What is Secret Shopping?
Secret shopping (or mystery shopping) is a research method designed to gather first-hand insight into a consumer’s experience by phone or in person. Secret shoppers are trained to gather and document information about specific aspects of the encounters. Experienced secret shoppers are accustomed to working with scenarios and pivoting quickly when needed to avoid disclosing their role. Secret shopping has been used successfully by many industries for decades.
Why Secret Shopping in Healthcare is Different
Mystery shopping fast food restaurants, hotels and banks is very different from healthcare. A medical mystery shopping company is well versed in HIPPA, insurance fraud and ethics. Ordering a hamburger is different than asking for an appointment, especially following CMS disposition codes. Secret shoppers need to know how to handle different scenarios and roadblocks during the call in order to accurately rate the encounter.
What to ask potential secret shopping vendors:
- Is the vendor a call center or secret shopping company?
- How many secret shopping calls have they made to medical practices in the past?
- What are their quality assurance measures?
- Are calls recorded and reviewed? If so, how will they stay in compliance with various states’ recording laws?
- With 20 different disposition codes, how do they ensure the correct code is entered into the survey?
- What percentage of their secret shopping is done within healthcare?
- Do they have benchmarking data on appointment access?
- How will they avoid making multiple calls to a single provider?
- How does the client access the data, and is it available in real time throughout the study?
- Are secret shoppers certified?
- What are the criteria?
- Do they have a medical professional overseeing and advising on scenarios to ensure they are:
- Non-urgent?
- Appropriate for the type of practice being assessed?
Health plans partnering with Baird Group can rest easy knowing that we are prepared to navigate the CMS intricacies and deliver high quality, reliable data that clearly represents you providers’ appointment access.
For more information contact hillary@baird-group.com or set up a 15 minute consult
Mystery Shopping Case Study
ACHIEVING STRATEGIC OBJECTIVES THROUGH MYSTERY SHOPPING
