The Obama administration has decided against doing surveys that would involve having “mystery shoppers” calling doctor’s offices in order to find out information about how difficult it would be to get an appointment. This decision comes after much criticism of the idea.
A “mystery shopper” is a term used to describe a person who is pretending to be a typical customer, but who is actually doing a type of undercover investigation for the purposes of gathering specific types of information about the business, corporation, store, or office. You may have heard the term “secret shopper”, which means the exact same thing.
When a mystery shopper is used, the idea is that the person will blend in with the real customers. The people who work for that store, or office, or business, won’t have any idea that they are interacting with a mystery shopper. The mystery shopper is usually paid to report back to someone about certain aspects of customer service that the person who hired them wanted to find out about.
Some people might view a secret shopper as a positive thing, because they think that this technique reveals the truth about what real customers of that business actually experience. Others may see it as a sneaky, and somewhat underhanded, way to gather information. An argument could be made that one cannot reliably extrapolate relevant information about the quality of customer service that a business provides based on a few, random, moments that are not compared with any other experiences with that same business.
The Obama administration was preparing to have mystery shoppers call 4,185 doctor’s offices in nine different states. The plan was for mystery shoppers to call a total of 465 doctor’s offices in Florida, Hawaii, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Mexico, North Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and West Virginia. After facing some criticism, this idea has been put “on indefinite hold”.
There have been some studies done that found that doctors and dentists are reluctant to give appointments to patients who are using Medicaid or Medicare as their form of health insurance coverage. The purpose of the mystery shopper survey was to see if those results could be confirmed. The overall purpose was to get a glimpse into what was likely to happen after 30 million people get health insurance through the Affordable Care Act.
Critics of this idea feel that the mystery shopper surveys are a waste of taxpayer’s money. It has also been said that the “clandestine method” of obtaining information was “questionable”. One could argue that the secretly done surveys could cause people to begin to distrust the government. At this time, the surveys will not be conducted as planned. This does not mean they will not happen in the future, however.
Image by Leonid Mamchenkov on Flickr