New Phase of Our Life Will Begin Soon

Before the month is gone, I will be retired. After almost 28 years of working for one company, I will say goodbye. I've worked at home for this company for the past 12 1/2 years. But, before that, I've watched and helped this organization change and grow.

We have gone from index cards and microfish to paperless medical records.

We have gone from one specified person taking a needed chart to the floor to the doctor being able to pull the chart up on a computer screen.

We have gone from doctors coming into a room to physically sign their charts and to dictate their reports, to electronic signatures and recording devices on every floor of the hospital.

We have gone from 13 coders in an office coding from a foldered chart to over 75 coders coding in their jammies in front of their computer at home.

I was one of those coders. Jammies, coffee, cigs and a computer. That was my world. For over 12 years that was my world. From uploading my work every morning and hand writing all the codes and faxing it into the department, to reading an already scanned chart, coding it and hitting finalize and watching it disappear, to a computer program that supposedly codes the chart for you. Yeah...a computer program that codes the chart for you...

This, I think, is the main reason I am retiring. Coding isn't enjoyable for me anymore. Spending my evenings deleting erroneous codes and rearranging good codes is not my idea of coding. Spending my evenings trying to make a chart look as if it has been coded correctly, the way I was taught, and then being criticized because my production is down is disheartening and just plain wrong.

Maybe I should explain what "coding" is: You go into a hospital to get your knee fixed or have your gallbladder taken out, or you go to an outlying facility and have an x-ray or a mammogram or you fall and go the the emergency room. When you do that, someone has to pay for it, hopefully, your insurance. In order for your insurance to pay for it, they have to know what was done. That's coding. Putting your diagnosis and procedures that were done into ICD9 & CPT codes. Those codes tell the insurance company what was done to you and they pay your bill based on those codes. In other words...I don't code it, it doesn't get paid and the hospital turns into a parking lot.

With that said, you can see how the accuracy of coding should be paramount, right? It would seem that this is not the case anymore. This computer program that codes the charts for us, is a disaster. It's function is to pick out key words and convert them to diagnosis codes and key phrases to turn them into procedure codes. Subsequently, some of it's "coding" is beyond ridiculous. Example: lady comes in w/a headache. Her neighbor had a stroke last week and the headache scared her. Diagnosis from the program? Stroke. I could go on forever, but, I'm not going to. This is what I've become, a deleter..not a coder anymore, a deleter.

I guess I delete too slowly, because for the past 3 months, my production has been down. Since it's been 3 months and I haven't improved, I was instructed that I had to come IN to the hospital to work for 2 months or until my numbers went up.

I have been home since the last century. Never any problems before. Always got good yearly reviews and my raise. Now, because of this monstrosity called ACTUS, I'm not a good enough coder anymore. So, instead of driving 50+ miles one way 5 days a week for 2 months and going out to buy a work wardrobe (jammies aren't part of the dress code at the hospital)I put in my 2 weeks notice and I will retire early.

My daughter told me I should blog now that I'm going to be a lady of leisure..ok, this is the first.