2024, Technology, Uncategorized, work

Lies, Damned Lies, And Statistics

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I was rather alarmed last Tuesday morning to get an email from my Regional Director insisting I attend a meeting that afternoon with her and four other quality control and administrative staff to discuss some problems with my “compliance” data for timely completion of psychological evaluations.

I have 20 working days from the time I first see a client for an evaluation until the report has to be entered into our electronic record system. I do about ten evaluations a month. My compliance rate is typically 90-95% of the evaluations completed within the 20 day time period. Compliance is a big deal for my agency, as our accreditation and licensure are dependent on everyone getting their paperwork done on time. 90-95% is an acceptable rate of completion.

We have electronic scheduling that helps determine paperwork compliance for most appointments. If your note is completed, a little “F” pops up on the appointment on the schedule. Due to reasons that are too tedious to relate, that doesn’t work for psychological evaluation completion. Someone has to keep a spreadsheet that lists the client’s name, date(s) of evaluation, and date of report completion. A quality control staff has to hand calculate the compliance rate. Most importantly, the appointment in the electronic calendar has to be deleted by the keeper of the spreadsheet.

At the meeting I was informed my compliance rate had dropped to 7%. Well, I knew that wasn’t accurate. I asked who was keeping the spreadsheet. None of the five other people knew what I was talking about. I then reminded them that unless the appointments were deleted from my electronic calendar, it would appear that they weren’t completed if they ran a compliance check with the electronic appointment system. I also told them that none of my evaluation appointments had been deleted from the calendar for more than a year, so it would erroneously seem that I hadn’t finished a report since January, 2023. It was at that point that the they suddenly remembered that my “noncompliance” coincided with the departure of a support staff who had apparently been responsible for the spreadsheet and the deletions, and hadn’t told her replacement or anyone else about it when she left. Everyone was quite apologetic about the mix-up.

Dealing with this nonsense took the better part of a day, what with my fuming and gnashing of teeth and doing my homework to figure out what had gone awry. It reminded me yet again of the danger of poorly run statistics.

Do you access your medical records on-line? What work deadlines have you had to contend with? When have you been wrongfully accused?

33 thoughts on “Lies, Damned Lies, And Statistics”

  3. i work all day with people of minimal skills and realize the companies who hire them feel lucky to have them . This is the state of the state today. Our future is in the hands of these people to look after a retirement that will last 40 or 50 years

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    1. Personally I’m not a big fan of April Fools Day. This morning Connections was little pictures instead of words… I’m really hoping that it was an April Fool deal and not a permanent change.

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      2. I didn’t make the connection between the date and this morning’s Connections. I share your hope that it doesn’t become a regular thing.

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        1. I actually didn’t make the connection with the little pictures and April Fools’ Day until I got onto the Trail. I hadn’t been awake long enough to think about the fact that it was April Fools’ Day

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        1. I am with you. If they don’t switch back to words, then I’ll be done with them.

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  5. I do not access my medical records online. I just like to have medical stuff told to me by my doctors/therapists, etc. And I assume that some day I will be forced to give way, but until then….

    There were three “chores” that I did in my old job that were nothing to do with my actual work but were good for the travel division. I talked to my boss about all three of these chores and wrote out instructions. Two of the three have fallen by the wayside. I know this because people have actually called me at home to ask me about it. The third has been parceled out to a handful of individuals and apparently this is not working very well. SIGH.

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  6. I access my medical records online regularly despite Mayo Clinic making it a challenge due to a slow website redundancies, and clumsy execution. But seeing test results almost immediately instead of waiting for a doctor or nurse to call and perhaps playing telephone tag is still more of a pain.

    I haven’t had a work deadline in 30 years because I haven’t had a “real job” since 1994 (Stock trader, indie author who makes his own rarely met deadlines 🙂 ).

    My wife wrongfully accuses me on a regular basis. However, she turns out to be right about half the time. I guess I call that “we’re even.”

    Chris in Owatonna

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  7. Rise and Shine, Baboons,

    Oh, Renee, I had memories of such bureaucratic follies when I read this. The situation you are in just leaves me speechless, but it is way too familiar. In bureaucracies there are many invisible nooks and crannies that are important. Nobody knows until something like this happens.

    In 2016 when I sold my business to two co-workers, there were several situations that were similar, and they included billing practices which generates income in a private practice. Some of the situations were big things.  The buyers wrongly accused me of poor management, etc. I decided that the best revenge is living well, so I took their money and warned those I cared for. The buyers did not listen, one of them outright lied, and within 2 years therapists started to quit. Then one partner backed out and the remaining lonely buyer “sold” the business, or what was left of it, to another clinic in early 2023. This seems to play out over and over when businesses change hands.

    I have been wrestling with Lou’s electronic medical records. Everything is now in place, but he is just the wrong age to have easily transitioned to on-line banking or electronic medical records. So I had to gain access to it all so that I can start making claims on Long Term Care insurance benefits with the records. (This included awakening napping customer service reps who loudly yawned during my calls. Really?) For this task, these records are a godsend. Chris, your comment on Mayo’s lousy on-line experience makes me shudder. If Lou gets into the neuro clinic there, I have to make another online account for him with a weak system. Uff Da 

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      1. It was. But once I caught onto the primary buyer’s attitude, I donned emotional steel and got through it. Nothing I went through was as bad as what she brought onto herself.

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    2. Hi-

      We all use ‘Epic’, which is the Mayo internal name for the electronic records. It works well, but, of course, you need to figure it out first. When Epic was first announced it was coming, a lot of Mayo people retired; they just weren’t willing to put up with it. I think it’s harder for the staff and dealing with it / using it, then it is for us as the end user. We like it. As Chris said, you can see test results as soon as they’re done. Pictures, ex-rays, doctors notes, refill prescriptions, send the doc a message, it’s pretty handy. The problem might be fighting between an outside insurance provider and the Mayo account.

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  8. I was wrongly accused by a Robbinsdale neighbor (I’ve written about this long ago) of a number of things – it was probably another neighbor’s cat who dug up her plants, but I did put the cats on leashes after that. And I moved our barbeque as far away from her as I could… We stopped speaking for the last year or so that she lived next door. It was too bad, because we’d had a good time before that – she had a real sense of humor, but I should have known when she pronounced New Age to rhyme with sewage.

    I’ve set up online medical records so that I can easily check in from home for appointments, etc. There have been a couple of times when it was useful, but I don’t regularly go there.

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  9. You would think they’d know you and your work ethic better, and question the huge change in the data, Renee. Humans should still use their brains. Computers can fail.

    Yes, I have accessed my medical records online for years. I enjoy having those results at my fingertips. I also prefer to send messages instead of calling the doctor and telling my tale to someone who then relays it to my doctor and getting a phone call back at an inopportune time. The online world appeals to my introverted nature. Once my mom needed my help navigating her health care, I set up an online Mayo account for her too. I never had any trouble with it. I did have to give them a signed release form to set it up for her account. It worked well.

    You see all your coworkers in a revolving time system when you work in a group home. If something goes wrong, the staff look back to see who was working the evening shift (usually me). They always blame it on the evening person or the night person. The supervisor was usually there on the day shift so if there were any tales of woe to tell, she would hear about them. I was often the scapegoat. Lots of times it’s pure jealousy and spite. You get thick skin.
    You were all pretty funny over the weekend. Sorry I missed it. I closed on my new timeshare last Friday and I’m not home. No Fools.

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    1. It’s just up Hwy 61 from Two Harbors. It’s a Lakehome in Superior Shores. It’s all the way at the end of the road that serves this place. It’s been very quiet but I’m sure it won’t be so quiet come summer.

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        1. It’s a 1/8-share, so 7 nights every 6-7 weeks. I should be able to get my Lake Superior fix without staying in expensive hotels or VRBOs all the time. I have failed to move up here, for a number of reasons, so I’ve made this my compromise. I will also have the ability to rent the place out (on my own interval) if I want to. Or if I want to have a group up here, I can rent another unit from another owner. This unit is still looking for owners. I could have bought three shares. I thought that might be too much of a good thing.

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        2. I stopped by and bought a couple bars of goat milk soap from our friend Barb in Blackhoof today. She and the SB are well.

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        3. Sounds absolutely wonderful. Do you have a lake view from your unit? Barb and Steve have a wonderful view of Lake Superior from their apartment (condo?) in Duluth.

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  11. Yes, I access my medical records online. I find it an quick, easy, and efficient way of getting test results in a timely manner.

    Because mental health counseling was such an important part of the services the alternative school, where I worked, offered, I’m somewhat familiar with how stringent state and federal reporting requirements are. I’m also familiar with how “creative” some of the licensed practitioners could be in circumventing them. You can’t blame the computers for the negligence of the humans who are supposed to run them. It’s one thing to have something fall through the cracks; it’s another to deliberately create the cracks for things to fall through.

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  12. My mom had to renew her BCBS / MA stuff before 3/1. The county didn’t want the paperwork prior to 2/1 and not after 2/8. I returned 2/5. But I had some questions. Their office doesn’t take phone calls between 8AM and 1PM “In order to get work done”. I left a message. Two weeks later the call was returned. Emails, however, that was the way to go. I’d get an email returned within the day usually.

    Then on Friday, 2/23 I get letters saying the paperwork isn’t complete and she’s going to lose funding. Saturday I got two more letter saying basically the same thing. Do they plan those to be delivered on the weekends?? Plus a letter copying the nursing home saying she wasn’t covered.

    However by Monday, I got an email returned and Tuesday I got letters saying it was all OK.

    Daughter is in the same boat now. Kelly and I joked, first we’ll get three letters saying she isn’t qualified before we get the one that she is.

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  13. I was falsely accused at work. For about five years, my team had the boss from hell. At one time or another, just about everyone was driven to tears (yes, even the guys). Our VP did nothing to intervene. One year she made up negative things about me on my review, claiming I shouted and argued during meetings. I’m a borderline introvert, so it was clearly ridiculous, no one believed it, but she got away with it.

    Sorry about your experience, it must have been quite a shock. It appears it was due to incompetence rather than malevolence. Unfortunately, there’s way too much of both in the workplace.

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    1. Thus made me remember my last boss at Software Etc. One of those managers who believe they have to clear out the dead wood when they come into a company. He accused me of colluding with a transferring colleague to have the moving van go way out of its way to pick up extra stuff. I was on medical leave at the time and clearly remembered telling the moving company that while I was out, all decisions were to go through Boss. One of my closest friends (still is) was the director of security and he suggested that a lie detector test would get Boss off my back. When Boss realized I was willing to do the test, he completely dropped the whole issue. I found a better job within a month of that insanity.

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  14. They’re celebrating in Mankato tonight because both the men’s and women’s MSU-Mankato basketball teams are returning home as NCAA champions. Well done.

    Was hoping Clyde would give us a short report, but he has been quiet for a while, so probably not felling up to it.

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