I work in the contract management division of the billing department at a hospital. If a claim does not appear to be paid correctly, the first thing I check is whether or not the patient’s insurance has been correctly registered (this can affect how the contract software calculates the reimbursement). If it’s not registered correctly, I have to fix it. This usually takes about 15 minutes per account (I re-register the claim and have to run it through the system again. The claim has to go through overnight processing. The next day, I have to make sure the claim paid correctly and make any corrections).
Since I started this position in January, I’ve had to do this for about 350 accounts. At the rate of 15 minutes per claim that comes out to about 87.5 hours! It would have taken someone in registration about one minute to do it right in the first place.
It isn’t easy to be a competent cow-orker. It is demanding work, and much less prestigious than being a horse-orker or a moose-orker. Even the pay for sheep-orkers is better.
Sorry, I just had to.
Much of my day is taken up doing stuff that other people don’t know how to do. They work in this business, but they don’t have any training, or appear to want any training, in the skills that could make their work shine. So I do it, because otherwise it would go out to the public and suck, which would make the company look bad. It gives me a kind of job security, too - I’ve outlasted three changes of staff.
Today, I was given a recording of a chat between two people. It ran 15 minutes. I was asked to take out the “ums” and “ahs” and repetitions, and make the contents coherent and polished. I got 6:15 into it, but it took two hours and I made in excess of 200 edits. I fixed up multiple paragraphs, and then one of them would say, “we should’t use that bit.” So I’d have to edit out a whole finished section and make it sound like the part after it was connected to the part before it. I gave up and told the department head that at this rate it would take me seven or eight hours to finish, and the damned thing only needed to be five minutes long. I was late in doing my actual job and could not devote any more time to it. So it will not run tomorrow as scheduled. There are places where even I refuse to go.
All of my wife’s time at work is spent dealing with morons. They don’t know how to do their jobs, they can’t understand the rules and regulations of the industry, they can’t see how the work they screw up sets a lot of other departments behind and makes clients angry. She is, among other things, an internal auditor and in charge of ethics. It’s a constant battle to get these people, including the management, to see why the way they want to word an official written assessment of a situation to make it look like they didn’t do something wrong, is unethical. The departments are graded on performance, and when they lose points, the department heads take it personally that she is docking points because they fucked up. They hate her guts and think she is out to get them. She is looking for a new job. She’s at the point now where she takes a sick day now and then because she can’t face going there one more day to deal with those morons again. When she leaves, there will be no one there with the intellect to comprehend ethics. They will be committing violations left and right, and nobody will be able to tell the difference.
Around 5-10% of the user ID requests that I get are goofed up in one way or another, resulting in at least as much time wasted trying to sort them out.
Sometimes it’s for some arcane reason related to Sarbanes-Oxley or other obscure internal audit policies, but usually, it’s for skipping over the section of the request form filled with BRIGHT RED words like REQUIRED or IMPORTANT. Oddball stuff like the user’s name…
At least my immediate co-workers are pretty good and we don’t get very many returns because of errors. Our sister departments, OTOH… Oy! Some of those folks can’t tell the difference between a request to issue someone a phone number vs creating a user ID on the mainframe.
Thankfully, my job only requires me to deal with one person who makes it difficult, and that’s only because he’s quite scatter-brained. Smart, and good at his job, with the attention span of a gnat. He forgets everything until the last minute.
Oh, and one other person, but he’s the guy who signs the paychecks. Preoccupied, forgetful, distracted, and impossible to track down 99% of the time. I hound him for three days for approval on some huge project, and he strolls by a day after deadline and tosses it on my desk, saying, “Love it, hon. Get ‘er done.”
I work in a local government agency, and incompetency and indifference abound. I spend a considerable portion of my workday correcting mistakes made by others. No one is held accountable. No one cares that the mistakes they make cause trouble and re-work. No one gets fired for incompetence. Personal phone calls and surfing the 'Net for hours are standard procedure for many of my co-workers. There are some who do about 3 hours work in an 8 hour day. It is unbelievable. Some of us in government actually want to do and try to do a good job. But our co-workers make it so difficult.
I hate to admit, but my own incompetence makes everybody else’s lives difficult at my job.
I was put in charge of making the schedule. However, I am really unhappy about this, because personally I don’t like doing it, nor am I very good at rolling out an error-free schedule. Yesterday there was a lot of confusion attributed to my own incompetence and I felt absolutely awful about it. Nobody chews me out about it but I still feel guilty about the mistakes I make. I’d much rather relinquish this responsibility and leave it in the hands of someone more capable, so I don’t have to deal with the pressure.
I feel your pain! I work in the Medical Records Department of a hospital!
Especially ER registration :mad: Hello! When you find your self changing
the first name, sex, and date of birth on someone in the computer! Shouldn’t
that clue you in, that you have the wrong Medical Record. I swear this is true
and happened too may times. Usually they are just so lazy that instead of
finding the patient’s previous Medical Record #, they just generate a new one,
leaving use to clean up their mess.
I don’t want to even do the math on the time I’ve wasted … I can already feel
my blood begin to boil!
And I’m not going to rant about the Labor & Delivery unit, which get to register their own patients; I’d be here all day!
I work in medical records at a large nursing home. Part of my job is to do the admission paperwork. To do this I have to use a checklist of various things that need to be answered/accounted for on the doctors admission orders. It’s the nurses job to fill out the admission orders. I rarely handle admission orders that are filled out completely or correctly, causing me to track down the nurse and have her contact the doctor to complete the orders.
I understand when it’s a newly graduated nurse, but some of the worst offenders are long timers and they know how this process works. :rolleyes:
I also put together the paperwork that every patient needs to take with them to doctor appointments. I try to stay a week ahead, using the appointment books on each nurses station. It never fails though, two or three times a week I get called “stat” down to a nurses station to get paperwork ready for someone who is on a stretcher and being taken out the door. Why is their paperwork not ready?? Because no one bothered to put the appointment on the calendar.
The latter annoyance just about always happens right in the middle of my lunch break, making it uber annoying. :mad:
At one of my previous jobs, where I was working as a records clerk/secretary for a medical research project, it took me weeks to sort out the #^¢*ed up mess that was supposed to be a database. I had very little database experience before this, but I guess I had the right kind of mind to deal with it.
First of all, someone had used Social Security Numbers for the ID in the database. This was A) illegal, B) unwieldy, C) against the policy of their home office, and D) redundant. They had a Patient ID assigned to each person as they passed through intake. Why have the SSN too? We ended up getting an edict from someone way up the food chain to immediately stop using SSNs as IDs for patients and had to go through four years of patient reports, multiple reports per patient, blacking out that information as well as reorganizing the voluminous filing cabinets to fit the PID system that should have been the default from the beginning.
They had the answers from a four page questionnaire --over 150 entries-- put into a single table in Access. Good lord, why do ten people with a Master’s Degree or higher not understand why this is bad? The records were originally associated with the SSN. One of the first things I did was to do it by PID. When the change came, it only took me about 2 minutes with a global search and delete to put their computer records in compliance. It would have taken those witches months.
They were amazed when I was able, with my newly-reorganized tables, to pull out combinations of information in reports that they’d had to do manually before. It took me half the time to enter information with greater accuracy than they’d achieved before because I set up a proper entry form with drop down menu boxes and auto-completion. Of course, I still had to go back and audit the entire DB because I started finding duplicate, erroneous, misspelled, and just plain confusing records as I made all these changes.
The scary thing is that while I was teaching myself Access, I was still doing the other work faster and more efficiently than the girl they’d had doing it before. On that job, I’d say that about 75% of what I did was cleaning up their mess. A lot of the new things that came in needed to be streamlined, but I did that whenever I was given a chance, so that wasn’t so bad. At that job, I found out first hand that Ph.D. and Master’s Degree holders can be brainless twits too.
This morning? 80%. Mostly consisting of answering emails and phone calls relating to coordinating a software release this evening - every single question answered in an email I sent out last Wednesday. Including all the people who now seem to be bewildered by the process.
Please take this as encouraging rather than preachy, but instead of dwelling on how bad you are at this and how many mistakes you made, how about focusing on how you can improve at this task? Some people are just naturally good at this kind of organizational stuff, but some people (like me, for example) need to work at it.
Often times I find when I’m having a hard time organizing things it’s because I’m trying to go directly from my head to paper, when it’s much more helpful to have the information in a concrete form I can manipulate and rearrange. I’ve never had to do a complex schedule, myself, so this is just brainstorming, but . . . If someone is supposed to have, say 5 hours this week, make up five identical index cards that list the person’s name and when they’re available. Do that for each person. (Seems like a lot of work, but if people are usually avaible the same times every week, you only have to do it once, and update as necessary.) Then make an index card for each timeslot you need to fill, and lay them out on the floor. Then you can match the people-cards with timeslots, rearranging as necessary. Or put the times on Post-its and stick them to people-cards. Or put the people and their times on Post-its and stick them to a calendar. Or something else, whatever works for you. If it were me, I would try to make it fun, with markers and different colors, but I’m just girly that way. Possibly stickers would be involved somewhere. :dubious:
The whole production might seem kind of silly, but as you get the hang of it you could streamline the process. It could be that an investment of time, effort and materials now could make it easier and faster to do the schedule from now on—and prevent error.
Possibly stickers would be involved somewhere. :dubious: