Did I tell you I was working remotely?
It’s been so long, I don’t remember.
This is how it happened, if you want to catch up.
How’s it going?
Glad you asked.
In a nutshell? I like it. I can see why so many federal workers don’t want to go back into the office. It’s a sweet gig.
Of course, I haven’t left my house for three days, I’ve become a hermit, (which I’m okay with, to be honest), and my biggest decision of the day is which color of sweats I want to wear for the day, but I’m loving it!
So, what do I do? I know you’re thinking it …
I still work for the hospital. I know, I sort of can’t believe it, either. Ever since the whole COVID thing I’m amazed that I’m still in healthcare at all.
Though I’m still in healthcare, I’m no longer in a clinic setting. Do I miss it? I miss aspects of it. I miss the people I worked with, I miss the mental gymnastics required to juggle my doctor’s requirements while also taking care of the patients. It was mentally stimulating to me. What I don’t miss are the patients. Sure, there were some that were awesome, genuinely needed help and it was so satisfying to help them, but the majority of patients were looking for a quick fix, something, anything, to make them feel better and an excuse to continue making poor lifestyle choices. They wanted to feel better without taking accountability for their decisions and/or the way they lived their lives. And they were rude about it.
THAT was frustrating.
I’m still working with patients but not directly. I’m sort of the go-to between patients and clinic staff. For example: the physician orders a test, like an MRI, a CT, an Ultrasound, etc., then the scheduled test drops into our queue. We’re all responsible for taking care of certain alphas and right now, mine are M-R. So, any patient cases that come in with the last name beginning with M-R, I take care of.
Next, I get some information about the patient, the type of test being ordered and notes from the provider as to why he/she is ordering it. Then, I sign into the insurance portal, answer some clinicals questions and fingers crossed, insurance approves it. Sometimes it goes to pending, meaning insurance is wanting to review clinicals and other times, they deny it. When that happens, I have to contact the providers and let them know that the test was denied and they have the option of reaching out to the insurance company to discuss, (i.e. fight), the determination and try and get it approved with information only a provider can give. (I.E. more detailed information, that would have been handy to have in their notes but you can’t tell providers that, unfortunately). And contacting the providers is never fun. They are usually cranky, take it out on their clinicals staff, who are also cranky so …. I’m the bad guy by proxy. Even though it’s the insurance’s fault for denying it.
And that’s it. That’s what I do in a nutshell. Sounds riveting, doesn’t it?
But I love it. I love the research, I love the challenge of finding just the right combination of diagnoses and symptoms to satisfy the insurance’s algorithm and that coveted approval status.
And I’m quite good at it. I can dig, read between the lines and get those suckers approved. Not always, but a big part of the time. My secret? I used to work in the clinic setting so I KNOW the clinical side of this equation. When it comes to the ins/outs of insurance plans/policies – nah – totally stupid.
But I get through it and I’ve learned a lot this past year.
I volunteered to become a peer mentor, which is a fancy way to say “trainer.” I really enjoy training. I like showing people the logical progression of learning a job and how it fits into the “big picture.” I feel like too many people get trained with blinders on, they only learn this small portion of the bigger process and that leads to people only doing a half-ass job and/or not fully understanding their job, period. I’d like to be a peer mentor for the whole group, but our group is split and we have different supervisors and I don’t know if the other supervisor would want me to come over and train some of their peeps, but I’m willing!
In the meantime, the UAT (urgent action team), which is my group, is expanding to six people and I’m training our two newest people. Urgent action team, by the way, is exactly what is sounds like, we handle stat/urgent cases, add-on cases, and any cases where insurance hasn’t been done or the patients show up with new insurance.
That happens a lot. Pst, if you get new insurance, can you let your doctor’s office know ASAP? Thanks.
I trained one girl the whole month of November, and now I’m training the other girl this entire month. Eight hours, every day. Talking non-stop. Unless I don’t have a voice, then I’m typing everything out. Which is a challenge, to say the least.
The new girl is with management the first day, getting her equipment, etc., then, she’s with me full-time after that first day. That first week, we go over the programs we use, the insurance portals we use, what we do, WHY we do it, etc.
The second week, the new girl shadows me while I work cases and we talk through the processes, the challenges, etc.
The third week, the new girl works cases with me shadowing. These weeks are usually pretty long as I’m not really doing anything but watching, guiding, advising.
The fourth week, it really depends on the trainee. Is she ready to work cases on her own with me available for questions? If not, we repeat week three until she is comfortable-ish.
I also get a bit more money when I train. Which is another reason I enjoy training. 🙂
I do enjoy working remotely and I can’t ever seeing myself going back into the office, though, if we have to, I’m okay with that, too. It is a challenge to work remotely at times. Especially when you have a group of about 80 women. Women are drama personified anyway, and then you add in text/written communication, which can be misconstrued, misinterpreted, etc., and it can be challenging. I sort of like that challenge, though. I’m a written word geek, I graduated from college with a Technical Writing degree and I’m very good communicating via the written word. I know how to word things without putting the other person on the defensive. I know how to word things professionally but get my point across.
In short, it’s my jam.
But not everyone is proficient in this form of communication and it can be challenging at times.
The precertification department is divided into three groups – and those three groups all have a supervisor and a team lead. The groups are: radiology (including my team, UAT), Cardio, GI, Ortho, Pain Management, Surgery, VA, Med/IV, Oncology, Sleep/Pulm, Therapies.
When the team lead position for my group became available, I was asked, (very strongly), to apply for it. I didn’t. At the time, I was still pretty new and didn’t really know much about the precertification department as a whole and quite frankly, I didn’t want the additional headaches and problems that come with being in a leadership role.
However –
I did sort of promise that if the position became available again, I would apply for it. I’m really hoping the current team lead doesn’t go anywhere because I like what I’m doing now and don’t want to go any further. I’m only about four years away from retiring … do I really want to end my working career dealing with a bunch of overgrown little girls who love drama?
No thanks.
But we’ll see. I did promise and who knows what the environment will look like six months from now. If you can count on anything in business, it’s change.
In the meantime, the hospital is getting ready to switch over to a different EMR (electronic medical record) program and the head boss reached out to me to ask me if I would be interested in participating in the pilot program and being one of a few that will be trained in the program so I can help other people learn the program. This is very close to my Technical writing degree and I’m all about it. I’m really looking forward to starting that process. It means on-campus meetings, and probably endless Teams meetings, but I’m ready. I’m going to make a cheat booklet of how to’s and I’m going to ROCK this challenge. It’s all supposed to start early next year so … I have that to look forward to.
It’s really nice to work from home. Especially on bad weather days. But … sometimes, not very often, I do miss actually getting dressed and going into the office. Actually seeing people face-to-face. Again, not very often, but it does happen. I don’t leave my house the entire week and sometimes that can feel a bit claustrophobic. I do shower and put on makeup every day, I don’t feel “put together” unless I do that, but I’m lounging around in sweats/comfy clothes the majority of the time. The only time I really fix my hair and put a nice-ish shirt on is when we have meetings where we have to turn our cameras on.
Since I sit all day, I do walk on the treadmill for an hour right after I get up in the morning. Then I take my shower, put my face on and I’m ready to face the day. Sitting all day/night is not good for you and I definitely feel better when I walk on the treadmill. Get that blood circulating. I’ve toyed with the idea of buying a standing desk, and I still might at some point, but for now, I do sit all day. I will take short breaks and walk around the house sometimes just to stretch my legs.
I realize I’m very fortunate to have the opportunity to work from home. It’s a luxury, for sure. There are cons, but there are more pros and I’m really enjoying it. Kevin and I are still trying to figure out how to make Starlink work. We would still like to take longer camping trips and have the opportunity to being able to work on the road but our first experience was very poor and now I’m a bit discouraged.
In a nutshell: we went camping at the Diamond Mines in Arkansas and though the campground was beautiful, it was very forest-y and though we could get a signal, and it was a strong signal, we couldn’t KEEP the signal and it was nearly impossible to work with an unreliable signal. We were hard-wired in, we can’t use WiFi because the camper is a converted cargo trailer and in essence, a metal box, so that never works very well. We’re going to try Starlink at home, again, and see what happens. The first time we tried it we had trouble maintaining a signal, not as bad as when we went camping, (the signal would come on for a minute, then be off for two minutes – it was crazy), but it still wasn’t consistent. I’m going to reach out to our IT people to see if maybe there is a conflict with the company VPN.
All of this to say, we’re not giving up on the dream of traveling and working from the road, but we have some obstacles.
Okay. Back to work. Thanks for reading!
Write From Karen 