S.O.S.

HELP!

ALL HANDS ON DECK!

This has been the battle cry at work. On March 1st, the hospital that I work for switched our EMR (Electronic medical records) system. This has thrown everyone off kilter, myself included, and we’re moving at a snail’s pace. In addition to us not knowing where anything is, let alone collect those pieces and put the patient’s puzzle needs together, the work queues we work out of haven’t been working properly. It’s not that the program isn’t working, it’s working great, but that our preferences, parameters, settings all need to be tweaked and it’s slow going.

Another challenge is that we don’t really know what we’re doing, and this includes everyone. Management is in the same boat as us, so any time we have questions, we have to spend precious time looking at tip sheets or help pages, or good old fashion clicking around, to try and figure it out.

Since I’m part of UAT (the urgent action team), and time is of the essence … you can imagine what my life has been like these past two weeks. To be fair, the first week wasn’t that bad but now that we’re closing in on the second week, WOW.

This was predicted. The hospital has been planning for this switch for two plus years now and I have to admit, they’ve done a pretty good job of preparing people. They warned us the first four weeks were going to be tough, and they weren’t wrong.

They put together a Super User group of individuals through the entire hospital. I volunteered to be one of those Super Users. So – for the past year, we’ve had meetings that didn’t really say much or give us much information other than to reiterate time and time again, IT’S GOING TO BE TOUGH. HAVE PATIENCE, SHOW SOME EMPATHY … but I appreciated the effort because at least it was something.

The intention behind Super Users were to be available to help our peers through the process when we GO LIVE. Really, more for emotional support than technical support. Because we didn’t know anything more than our peers. Still don’t. We had early access to our training classes and were given early access to the system’s playground – which was a dummy set up, with dummy patients, that we could click around on and not have to worry about messing anything up, but additional training? No.

And that helped … somewhat. But all of that perceived confidence flew out the window the moment we went live and were actually in real-live patient charts. Things were set up differently, no one knew (or still knows), how to communicate with each other through this new system and patient care is moving at a snail’s pace.

This was expected, but it’s one thing to mentally prepare for it, it’s quite another thing to LIVE IT.

To be fair, I have it WAAAAAAAY easier than my poor clinic/hospital peers. The majority of my work is done through insurance portals. I’m getting information from the patient’s chart, placing it in a nice, neat package with a pretty bow on top to entice the insurance company to decide in my favor, and then once I have my answer from the insurance company, I document the crap out of it in the patient’s chart. So I’m working out of the chart but not really IN the chart.

Now – the clinic/hospital peeps – their whole job is to work IN the chart. They are clicking/documenting machines and I KNOW they’re struggling. You know how it is when you’re learning something new, it’s stressful, frustrating and tedious. And that’s just the program, then you have patients who are hurting, impatient and sometimes downright mean, and that only adds to the stress and the sense of urgency.

So – PLEASE, if you’re seeing your doctor or have to be in the hospital, or around any medical staff in general, PLEASE be patient and kind. You never know what the hospital staff is going through and being a-holes to them will only make it worse for yourself and the long line of people behind you.

(I put that in quotes to get your attention – haha!)

But back to me – because it’s all about me, of course.

To say we’ve been struggling would dilute the actual situation. We’re behind. We’re REALLY behind. Not just my team, (and there are only two of us at the moment so … YEAH – WE’RE BEHIND), but everyone. It’s a learning curve, we’ll get there, just not right now. So – in an attempt to get caught up and get reimbursed from insurance companies for testing that is being done, the hospital has approved all-hands on deck overtime for the next two weeks. In ADDITION to the normal overtime pay, (which thanks to Trump we no longer have to pay taxes on – at least until the next person comes in and reverses that because ORANGE MAN BAD), we get an ADDITIONAL chunk of change ON TOP of that overtime.

Folks … it’s good money. And you can bet your bottom dollar, (see what I did there?), that I will be taking FULL advantage of this opportunity.

To be honest, I already work a lot of overtime. It’s been an unspoken agreement between me and management for a long time – we’re only a two-woman team, after all. We’re working on hiring a third person, but let’s be honest, until I know what I’m doing, how can I possibly train another person what to do?? I work the day shift and my partner works from 12:30 to 9:00 PM. We can only do so much with the (wo)man power we have.

The straw on my camel’s back finally broke the other day and I had a meltdown. My tiny little group has been consistently dumped on these past two years so that I barely see sunlight anymore. We are the “problem-solving” group – anything problematic or anything mgmt doesn’t know what to do with, they dump on us. The biggest, and most egregious thing to be dumped on? Is we are expected to work other people’s pending cases when it falls into our “window.”

Let me explain. UAT works today, tomorrow and 48-hour cases. That’s just the way it was set up. The purpose behind UAT, or at least, it USED to be the purpose of UAT, is/was to take care of urgent/stat and add-on cases. The hospital has a dedicated team ready to handle these last-minute cases. But somewhere down the road, it was someone’s stupid idea to make it part of our duties to follow up (i.e. clean up), other people’s pending cases that haven’t been determined if they fall into our UAT window. This means, we are being asked to spend hours researching and fixing other people’s work.

So many things wrong with this scenerio – where do I start?

First of all – this takes responsibility away from the original analyst. Why put any effort into your work if you know it will soon become someone else’s problem?

Secondly – there is no motivation to do a good job. Why? It will soon become UAT’s problem. Enjoy.

Thirdly – Did you catch the part where I mentioned we are a TINY group of people? The other group that handles normal cases outside of UAT’s window? There are about 20 of them. Twenty people working cases and TWO UAT women. Do the math.

Fourth – when do we have time to do our normal work if we’re elbows deep in other people’s problems? Exactly.

There are so many more micro-aggressions to this problem I won’t bore you with the details, but that, coupled with us being buried w/ requests that aren’t routing properly in this new software and we’re becoming more and more behind … and I’ve been dealing with this “duty” for the past two years, trying every tactic under the sun but mgmt won’t listen to me … it’s like banging my head on a brick wall – I finally cracked.

My supervisor asked how things were going the other day and I nearly broke down and cried. For the record, I DON’T CRY. And if I do cry, it’s usually because I’m so frustrated that I’m about ready to explode, the frustration starts leaking out of my eyeballs. So, the fact that I was close to tears pissed me off. My supervisor could tell I was close to tears. I just told her I couldn’t talk about at that moment – I was too emotional and needed to compose myself.

We talked later. My supervisor is not the problem – I quite like her, actually. It’s upper management, but isn’t that nearly always the case in most companies? Upper management are typically a bunch of clueless zombies who 1. don’t know what we do, 2. make dumb decisions because see number one, 3. say a lot of nothing, management speak, when you do finally have a conversation and 4. NEVER LISTEN.

Anyway ..

I didn’t mean to go off on a tangent, but that’s what I’m dealing with right now. It’ s a lot. Not as much as the clinics and the hospital staff, but I have my own struggles, too.

I’m close to throwing in the white towel. And I still might if things don’t change. But I also need to be fair and rational about this. There is a lot going on right now, we’ll all stressed out and quite frankly, there is no place for me to go because there is a temporary hiring freeze until we can figure this stuff out. But my supervisor picked up on my frustration and she at least worked it out so that everyone now has to follow up on their own work. No more bashing UAT against the rocks. I’m sure people are not happy about having to finish what they started but seriously …

Wah.

So … all of that say, we’re all going to be working our fingers to the bone for the next few weeks. Hopefully, things start to settle down, iron out, and get better. If not, I guess I’ll be looking to make a lateral move in the precertification department.

Only time will tell.