A mock survey is an excellent way to check your alignment with regulatory requirements and ensure your survey readiness. It involves having unbiased, skilled reviewers, often an external third party, to look at your systems, processes, practices, and documentation to ensure that they address the requirements of your regulatory body and comparing the expectations per policy to the individual practices of the care providers. Additionally, there is considerable value to an objective view to identify unsafe patient care practices that could potentially result in harm to your patients, their visitors or even your staff. Client organizations use the mock survey approach as the backbone of preparing for upcoming surveys by identifying and addressing discovered vulnerabilities. This provides organizations the opportunity to test and practice their survey execution plan while the experts are on-site and also allows them to address any identified gaps or risks to ensure survey success and overall safety. Mock surveys may vary in their style, but their objective is consistent, to identify vulnerabilities so they can be addressed. Here is a peak at a mock survey, C&A style.
What to expect
Our team works with your organization’s regulatory contact in understanding your current needs and concerns. We tailor our mock survey approach to provide you with the greatest benefit for your organization. Working with your organization and its goals, we design a survey that is as large and comprehensive or as small and focused as needed. Our services can focus on the discovery of opportunities for improvement or on validation that your PI activities have resulted in improved outcomes. Our team of experts bring with them working knowledge of the latest regulatory and accreditation changes from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), The Joint Commission (TJC), Det Norske Veritas (DNV), Accreditation Association for Ambulatory Health Care (AAAHC), The Center for Improvement in Healthcare Quality (CIHQ), and others. Our teams have worked with organizations in different places on their quality and readiness journey and can customize our approach to providing you with the greatest benefit to support your goals.
How can my staff benefit from having a mock survey?
Honest feedback is provided on how your organization is performing and identifies risks throughout the organization. This is accomplished by conducting deep dives into your processes and in-depth conversations with your staff and leaders in a non-judgmental manner using the principles of appreciative inquiry. Our consultants will educate your team throughout the entire engagement. Our just-in-time education approach focuses on teaching staff the risk associated with the behavior and not simply on what the regulation or standard requires. Your team is committed to providing high quality, safe patient care but sometimes they may not recognize risky practices or opportunities without having an objective and highly trained team help them to see them.
By staying up to date on all the regulatory and accreditation requirements, we can provide a realistic survey process so you and your team can test your survey skills including surveyor to staff interactions and be fully prepared for your next survey. Identifying risk is an essential component of what we bring to your organization, but our consultants also bring resolution services to you. Our resolutions services are based on our ability to interpret the expectations of the standards and regulations and years of experience at the bedside, in leadership positions and form best-practices observed within the field. We provide feedback not only on compliance but also on how your organization can improve on survey execution and management to ensure you are putting your best foot forward during a real survey.
Sharing Results of the Mock Survey
Our mock surveyors will share their observations and findings with you and any members of your team that you desire to be present. On the last mock survey day, the mock survey team discusses the top areas of risk to provide your team with a solid starting point to initiate action planning. Within 5 business days of the end of the mock survey, a detailed report that includes our findings and recommendations for corrective actions will be provided as well as a copy of an executive summary and action planning tool. We will also share with you areas and attributes where your organization deserves special recognition for a job well done.
How to Get Started
The first step on any journey is the hardest. We provide you the best support in taking that first step as we have all been there too.
Contact us at 704-573-4535, send us a message, or request a proposal to take your first steps to regulatory readiness. We look forward to supporting your organization!