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INDIANAPOLIS BUSINESS JOURNAL
Focus: Innovators
VOL. 25 NO. 29, SEPT. 27-OCT. 3, 2004
Shopping for good health
Perception Strategies adds 'mystery' to medicine
By Shelley Swift
Special to IBJ
Mystery shoppers typically visit stores or restaurants, posing as everyday customers in order to give honest feedback on the quality of products and services customers typically receive.
But what if the service is something as critical as health care?
Knowing that standard patient satisfaction surveys weren't painting the full picture, former hospital marketing executive Kevin Billingsley set out to apply the mystery-shopping technique to the field of health care by launching Perception Strategies Inc. in 1997.
Using mostly actors, Billingsley's Indianapolis-based company sends mystery "patients" into health care facilities nationwide to gauge feedback on how patients are treated.
His customers are the health care companies that pay to see how their employees are doing.
"They want a snapshot of what they look like right now and how they can do better," said Billingsley, PSI's president and CEO.
He conceived the idea while working as marketing director for St. Joseph Medical Center in Fort Wayne, where he struggled to find a way to assess the center's performance.
"The only way I figured I could do that was if I injected somebody into the one-on-one experience between an employee and a customer. That's the only way I could get a sense of who we are and what we do," he said.
A trial run of the program proved successful, but Billingsley left the hospital due to a merger. Soon after, a colleague at another hospital was intrigued by the mystery-shopper concept, so Billingsley formed Perception Strategies to do the job.
While other companies now practice the concept, Billingsley said the high volume of assessments per client is what sets his company apart.
"We've done 20,000 [mystery visits] in the last six years. We do a lot of large volume, because we want to provide the quantitative and the qualitative" information for clients, he said.
Perception Strategies contracts with health care providers in 14 states, working mostly with companies that run multiple facilities.
The company has grown roughly 30 percent a year since its inception and employs a staff of seven, Billingsley said.
"We recruit our shoppers within the community that we've contracted with," said Billingsley, whose staff recruits mainly from local acting communities.
To assess the service received, the "patients" are asked to do anything from scheduling an appointment by phone to undergoing a 24-hour inpatient stay. To keep things genuine, Perception Strategies often seeks out "patients" who have a genuine health care need to perform certain evaluations, such as lab work or a mammogram.
The "patient" then submits a comprehensive report that is handed to the client. Reports also make note of employees who give exceptional service.
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