The secret shopper strategy that transformed Apex Spine & Neurosurgery's staff culture

Practice Management

When faced with patient satisfaction challenges, Cathy Jones, CEO of Atlanta-based Apex Spine and Neurosurgery, took an innovative approach to transform staff culture from within.

"What we were finding is that our patients were very dissatisfied, and we had to literally blow it up and put it back together again to understand our patient outcomes," she said at the Becker's 30th Annual Meeting: The Business & Operations of ASCs. 

Her strategy? Have someone undergo the patient experience themselves and report areas of improvement.

"We got someone to be a patient and walk through the process from the phone call to the front desk and how they were treated through the clinical side of things," Ms. Jones said. "No one knew who they were. Then they came to us and told us, 'You don't have enough parking,' 'We can't get into your building,' 'We were very poorly treated at your front desk,' and it just went on from there. We found a wonderful opportunity by just going through the process ourselves as if we were that patient, and we discovered a whole lot of things that we could then take us from harm to charm." Our surveys now are much better, our word of mouth is much better, and I'm happy to say we went from zeros on patient surveys to fives."

Addressing patient satisfaction scores became a matter of revamping staff culture as well as operational procedures. 

"You have to build that culture of appreciation," she said. "And we had not built that in. We had not recognized our staff or the really good work that they were doing, so they just were doing a job."

To address those gaps head-on, she shut down the clinic and dedicated time to train staff and create a cohesive culture within the building.

"Did it cost us money? Yes, it did," she said. "We put everybody through a skills assessment day. Where are their skills? Where are they at? It wasn't just the clinical folks that went through it. Our whole third floor, which is business oriented, went through basic life skills. The first floor learned who the third floor was. The third floor learned what an ASC was all about, and it really made for a community within that building that we were in. Once we did that, it showed in our voices on the phone, and it showed in the way we treated our patients." 

Ms. Jones said the experiment also revealed points of improvement in her staff model.

"We found out we had to have more staff in certain areas," she said. "One person cannot answer a phone and do all this scheduling for everybody," she said. "So we found out that as leadership, we were to blame too, and we tried to fix all of that."

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