Unlocking the Patient Experience: Mystery Shopping or Ethnography?
The research methods that produce the richest insight into patient satisfaction and the patient experience tend to be qualitative – e.g. mystery shopping, ethnographic studies. Qualitative methods can be messy, harder to analyze and less conclusive than quantitative research, but they often provide abundant, detailed information about systems and behavior not uncovered by quantitative methods alone. When patients tell you in their own words what happened, how they perceived what happened and “why” they felt the way they did, powerful insights and actionable information emerge.
Which Technique Should We Use?
Mystery shopping — Mystery shopping uses incognito “shoppers” posing as real patients to provide detailed feedback about their experiences. The mystery shoppers make surreptitious notes about each interaction as it occurs. Afterwards, they prepare detailed reporting about their experiences. Even a small group of reports can be very useful for uncovering patient expectations and presenting a graphic picture of your strengths and opportunities for improvement.
The kinds of mystery shopping assessments DHA professionals can perform are almost limitless. Those requested most include telephone calls, outpatient, inpatient, ER, clinic and competitor visits. In most cases, the mystery shoppers proceed through the entire inquiry, scheduling, registration, treatment and discharge processes. We’ve even gone up to the point of surgery. Occasionally we have requests for observation only visits, “shadowing,” or pairing mystery shoppers as companions to real patients.
Ethnography — Ethnographic studies depend on one or more observations and interviews conducted by DHA consultants. Ethnography is a relatively long-term, labor-intensive process. It requires consent from carefully chosen participants, sufficient …