A client said the other day, “Your phone ought to be ringing when hospitals realize they’re not going to get their VBP (see 8/1 post) check.” Time will tell, but the primary reason anyone hires a healthcare mystery shopping company is to answer the question “Are we doing what we told staff we wanted done?” What percentage of your employees go back to the same things they were doing immediately after being presented with another training initiative? Without doing extensive research, but having been on the training side of this consideration, I would say the 80/20 rule is in effect. That is to say 20% actually get fired up and try to implement some of what they heard.
Don’t get me wrong, I believe in customer service training as the only viable starting point. You need to create a level playing field. But what about after that? You’ve established the “this is what we want you to do” part, but how do you know if they are truly doing it? Can you afford to hope that everything you have put in place will bear fruit especially in light of the fact that you are using the same exhausted staff who has more on their plate than they know what to do with? It’s a lot to ask.
These days in healthcare it’s like the argument I heard on the radio the other day about the crumbling infrastructure in this country. If we don’t invest heavily now we will continue to fall behind other countries. The same can said for patient satisfaction. An investment into programs such as mystery shopping and employee perception deep dives will insure that there is a constant monitoring from the outside.