The Sky is Falling

I spent five years working in an inner city emergency room.  I was the guy who called your family if something happened, if there was an accident or tragedy.  I took care of the social side while the doctors handled the medical side.  I spent my nights working car accidents, gunshot cases, domestic violence, household accidents, etc.  While working there I saw my share of abnormal injuries and death.  The child killed by the toaster … the adult who lost a limb to the garage tools … When you work in that environment you see all the ways that the normal things in our lives can cause pain and injury.  After a while, you fear your toaster and have a new respect for your barbeque grill.

It’s the same in this field.  I spend my days looking at the worst possible billing situations.  I see people paying 17% for billing when 7% is perfectly fair.  I see billers making mistakes and hiding their errors.  Perfectly good pathology cases are not being billed, account receivables are greatly inflated and stuff is hidden in drawers.  It is not unusual to see where good solid pathologists are losing lots of money.  When you see this over and over again you start to see trends.  And like in my past life, you begin to think the sky is falling.  Everything becomes the next great failure.

It’s amazing how our environment affects our outlook.  When you are in a given environment for a long period of time you begin to think that is “normal.”  I see this when I audit billing practices.  Groups say over and over again, “things are going great here” and when I audit them I find thousands of dollars that were never collected due to bad diligence.

It’s hard to see your environment and how it may be twisting your outlook.  I have to be mindful of how these inputs affect my thinking.

Ask yourself how your environment is affecting your outlook? Are you afraid of your toaster, are you ignoring the 50-gallon drum of gasoline in your living room?  Is everything normal or are you blinded by your nearness to the situation?  Is the sky falling or not?