Ever get the feeling that you're always just a couple of steps behind the power curve, a day late and a dollar short, jogging along at the back of the pack, perennially playing catch-up?
That would be me.
I hear about a writing contest that's right in my wheelhouse ... only to find I've missed the deadline by mere hours.
I get too busy to check my e-mail one day ... and miss the "today only!" bargain on something I really want (with free shipping!), or find that all available seats on a time-limited airfare deal have been snatched up.
For that matter, I hear a great new song on the car radio, come home and tell my 30-something daughter about it .. and she gently tells me that this song was released last year, she's downloaded it, and it's been her cell phone ringtone for months.
So it came as no surprise to me that, once I pulled my head out of the sand with respect to what's been happening in the healthcare documentation world for the last few years and tuned back in, I've missed some opportunities.
Had I emerged from my self-inflicted fog just last year, for example, I may have been able to take advantage of the federally funded HITECH Workforce Development Program grants for a community college course in EHR implementation support. This is something that could, potentially, either take my career in a new direction or increase my value to my present employer while also neatly dovetailing with what I already bring to the table.
Funding for all of the programs I looked at that were feasible for me in terms of either commuting distance to a classroom or offered online, however, seems to have dried up in 2011. Did the necessary support workforce anticipated by HHS already get trained in 2010-2011? Probably not, but I missed the first wave of full-ride grants.
Heck, I didn't even know that whole program existed until last month. Talk about being out of touch with the industry.
That's not uncommon in MTs. We tend to filter out what doesn't seem immediately pertinent. It's partly a carryover from the filtering process we employ in transcription. The "uhs", stammers, and extraneous words in dictation, to say nothing of background conversations and other noise, get immediately categorized by our experienced ears as irrelevant. It's difficult, if not impossible, to do this job well if one is not intensely focused by nature.
But it's become especially critical now to also have the ability to shift from tight focus to a wide-angle lens, and explore what we see through it instead of just giving it a quick filter through our personal immediate relevancy data set. We've become so good at tuning out that, unless some news item gets our attention by specifying "medical transcription", we slide right past it.
It's not enough to see ICD-10 implementation on the horizon, for example, and then turn back to our little corner of the world figuring that it doesn't apply to us. Really? If it means more detailed coding, guess where the detail comes from?
Whether it's via EHR or our existing workstations, the patient narrative will be entered and edited by someone, in some fashion. Might it not be a good idea to seek out at least a "For Dummies" rundown on ICD-10 (or EHR, for that matter) so that we can better anticipate what's coming down the pike in our particular situations?
I look at how we -- and I include myself squarely in the middle of that "we", MTs as a whole -- dealt with speech recognition, and are still dealing with it. Rare is the MT who wholeheartedly embraced it, dived into it, loves it and wouldn't go back to straight transcription on a bet. Rightfully so; we all know the technology, while improving, is still a long way from living up to its hype. But how many of us dreaded it, resisted it, and when finally faced with having to learn and use it adopted something very close to a victim mentality even as we slogged through that process? It was "look what they're doing to us" (a chorus we'd just sung about offshore transcription, as well).
Heaven forbid that, when word about SR technology as applied to medical transcription first hit the airwaves so to speak, some of us -- as experts on medical documentation, right? -- would have gone to the developers and said, look, Jack; in order for this to actually work well for everyone involved, it needs to do X on the front end and we need the ability to do Y on the back end, and you could make that platform a little less clunky.
During a brief but intense stint of creating database programs for an environmental health and safety department where I worked at one time, I learned that Rule One for success is to start with the end-user -- what he/she needs from the program in terms of navigation and use -- and build backward from there. Those who hype software aren't, usually, the end-users, and often have only a vague idea of what they do.
Were we, perhaps, waiting for "somebody else" to speak up for us -- with unexpressed and slightly unrealistic hopes that SR would be shelved indefinitely (or until we retired and didn't care any more)?
Okay, it's possible that even if some of us had taken that particular bull by the horns independently, SR may have looked pretty much like it does now anyway. But if we're confident enough in our knowledge and expertise to delineate what's wrong about "speech wreck" and say "nobody asked us", well, how did anybody know we were willing to be asked -- whether as part of a larger organization such as AHDI, or as individuals?
Do we trust our own expertise to even put ourselves out there and speak as experts in this field? We should. But only by tuning into what's happening in our industry as a whole, not just our little slice of it, can we see where to become engaged as experts.
There's a cure for "day late and a dollar short": Pour it on to catch up with the pack now, stay caught up, and then speak up. That's what I'm working toward.
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