Posted on 06/15/2015 4:28:07 PM PDT by detective
A Veterans Administration researcher used actors and pressured veterans into participating in a “secret shopper”-style project, and now the House Veteran Affairs Committee is investigating how the agency spent $900,000 for the faked study.
The head of the study, Dr. Saul Weiner, professor of medicine, pediatrics and medical education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, admitted actors were hired to portray veterans, according to a letter from the committee chairman, Rep. Mike Coffman, R-Colo.
“The actors wore hidden microphones to capture the physician-patient interaction; feigned symptoms that took real appointment slots from veterans and tied up facility resources, such as lab tests, while health-care professionals sought answers to the actor’s fake maladies,” Coffman said.
(Excerpt) Read more at wnd.com ...
It sounds like this was about checking the treatment that vets are getting from the doctors.
The VA doctors generally suck.
Can’t win if you do audit them.
Can’t win if you don’t audit them.
Maybe it ought not to have been done with fake “patients” which was a waste. But still.
Given the incompetence at the VA, I can understand the idea to monitor doctors there, but I’m sure there must have been ways to do it that wouldn’t have taken away services and resources from vets.
Did it say how many were impostors and how many were genuine.
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