Growth.................equals more challenges

I'm fried!!!  Not in the sunburn kind of way, but in the mental psychological kind of way.  Work, personal, etc, I'm just fried, burned out, tired.  I'm not even sure why.

I started AOM 9 years ago.  First employee was a very part time respiratory therapist.  Now we have 9 employees.  With growth comes many more challenges.  My goal has never been for AOM to be ran like a corporate company.  This too can cause a whole new level of challenges.  Corporate companies have rules/regulations, policies, that have no gray area.  Every patient, every client is treated the same.  The patient   per se becomes a number, an invoice, a quota.   In many ways this makes it much easier for employees  to follow the "ground rules".  

At AOM, I refuse to let the company go there.  Every patient is an individual with their own individual needs.      This becomes difficult when say the customer speaks to Employee A then calls back and speaks to Employee B.   When treating each patient/client differently, it is immensely important to keep notes about all communication made with clients.  This way each employee knows what were doing to help meet that patients needs.  It may be financial, extra products, special equipment, etc, but again, each patient is treated individually.

The can cause problems when all of your staff isn't on the same page.  Then you throw in the excessive audits that Medicare is performing.   Who's job is it to gather all the paperwork to meet the deadline of the audit?  Is it the intake coordinators? Is it the collections staff, or the billing staff?   Some DME companies now pay a staff member just to deal with the audits, that's how overwhelming Medicare has become.  No longer is a prescription all you need.  Now you need face to face clinical notes, history and physicals, ortho evaluations, etc.  it's never ending.    It's not that medicare is combating fraud among DME companies, but they are just making it harder to justify payment.

I had a great meeting with our pharmacy rep today.  I don't have to deal very much with medications,  but did you know that Medicare recipients have to buy into Part D?    Did you know that there is a whole separate deductible for Part D?   Did you know that it capped out at $2700.00?    I didn't.   I would guess that most seniors hit that 2700.00 mark pretty easily.   I guess what I don't understand is how is a 70 year old senior, on a fixed income, is supposed to afford all of this?  

Sorry, there was such a delay in posts.  I wanted to make sure all the Weightloss Challengers saw the results.  I still haven't heard from a few of you and if you haven't received your prize, it will arrive this week.

Thanks for reading.