The Secret's Out

I am the only full-time employee in my office. That's right, the only one here 8 hours a day, five days a week.

What that means in the medical office community is that I have to be able to learn (or at least sound intelligent about) a lot of various stuff.

Some of it is easy. Any one of us can handle routine med refills. I can give you an excuse slip for work. I can set you up an appointment to see a doctor and explain the basics of the nuclear stress test, echocardiogram, and heart catheterization. I handle all med records (scanning in, indexing, and entering in the computer --hooray for Electronic Health Records!!) in my office.

Some of it is a little more difficult. Reading doctor's handwriting, getting prior authorization from insurance companies (medical and prescription) for testing and meds, determining who gets an office visit and who is directed to the E/R for their chest pain, knowing which ICD-9 code will allow what kind of visit/lab/medication, and which ekg strips faxed from the event monitoring company need a doctor's review ASAP and which ones are safe to wait for my RN to address when she comes in.

I have had to learn what exactly is going on during the stress test and how the chemicals affect patients simply because they ask me questions and it seems kind of foolish to say, "I don't know, I just answer phones and collect copays. --Do you have that $20 with you or would you like me to bill you for it?"

I learned how to hook patients up to a holter monitor because when the primary docs from downstairs call for one it seems ridiculous to tell them that no one here can do it. --Not to mention that it's bad for business. So I learned to hook up and download holter monitors.

I'm not complaining. I'd rather be busy at work than waiting around trying to make my mental powers force the clock hands to move.

The one thing I've learned in life is that if you act like you know what you're doing, the general public will assume that you do.

So then today I get a call from our home office. It seems that the images from the nuclear stress tests that we did on Tuesday didn't load onto the server like they should have and would it be possible for me to re-load them and send them over to be viewed?

Apparently I give the impression that I'm secretly a Certified Nuclear Medicine Technologist.

Perhaps I should tone down the confidence a little, eh??