New Directions

Hello from week 2 of orientation! After some much enjoyed time off visiting friends and family in Cincinnati and Seattle, I have returned to the land of the working. My new clinic is part of federally qualified community health center organization that runs 4 clinics just outside of Denver. From humble beginnings with one provider in a small house with a curtain dividing the living room, our clinic has grown to provide over 170,000 patient visits yearly. About 40% of the patients are uninsured, 40% have medicaid, 15% have medicare, and a few have private insurance. I was surprised to learn that 98% of of our patients are below 200% of the federal poverty level. The clinic's mission is to be the medical provider of choice for low income people in our service area.

All new providers go through a 3 week orientation before being turned loose. This orientation includes 12 training sessions with my sworn electronic health record enemy, NextGen. I used this system for a year and a half in residency and made a little promise to myself that I wouldn't ever take a job that used NextGen. Alas, that promise has been broken, and I'll have to get over it. The real boon of NextGen is that you can use it for billing and data generation, despite its lack of user friendliness. (Click, click, click...Epic, I miss you...sniff, sniff.)

The first day of orientation, I had a skype meeting with our clinic scheduler who happens to work remotely...in Israel. I've also spend a lot of time shadowing the providers, medical assistants, front desk workers, and case managers at my clinic in addition to meeting with various people in the administrative office. Today I met with the finance department, HR, and the development director. Apparently, it takes 14 full time people in billing to collect our revenue!

Last week the CEO, who has worked in his position for over 20 years, took me to lunch at a local sandwich shop. (I don't think a CEO of anywhere else I've worked has ever said boo to me, much less bought me an artisan sandwich.) The clinic is all about teamwork, and they've done a good job to assure I have a good understanding of how the team functions.

I've been impressed by the many innovative problems that the clinic has been pursuing for the last 10+ years such as group visits, an integrated behavioral health program, and patient registries for diabetes, depression, hypertension, and pregnancy that generate quite a bit of data to support our quality outcomes.

And best of all, the clinic is about 20 minutes from my apartment!

To quote Annie, I think I'm gonna like it here!