Talk Radio News Service: News, Politics, Media

One the few bipartisan moments from Thursday’s health care summit came from a proposal by Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) to deploy undercover patients to detect waste and fraud in the medical system. Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) voiced his enthusiastic support and called it a “great idea ... that we can come together on.”

Despite apparent bipartisan support, the proposal has yet to receive the backing from a key group: the American Medical Association. In 2008, the organization tabled an endorsement for undercover patients.

Critics within the medical community have cited concerns that asking doctors to spend time with patient’s feigning ailments was essentially a misuse of resources that could be better spent on individuals with pressing medical issues.

Brooke Billingsley, the co-founder of Perception Strategies, an Indiana-based company that deploys secret patients, downplayed these fears.

“A lot of the studies that we do involve the patient and shopper aligning together as family members to go through the whole interaction so they’re not taking up an actual patient bed,” Billingsley told Talk Radio News Service.

Billingsley added that the use of undercover patients is an important tool in providing effective medical care.

“It’s the only true way to get an unbiased assessment of what the process is and what’s really occurring,” said Billingsley. “When you’re sending somebody in, they have no vested interest in the outcome.”