Tweet
Medical Imaging Tech[/bkgd]
Scheduling
Recently we've been having issues with outpatients getting delayed in registration due to not having orders in the system. The order is kindof important, as without it, we can't do our thing. So the brilliant solution the bosses came up with is to have the departments check the system the day prior and make sure all the patients have orders. Instead of getting the scheduling department to actually do their jobs. Because we don't have enough to do.
Also on that note, we get calls all the time from scheduling asking us when our open slots are. It's not so bad when it's an exam we don't do often, but it's grating when it's routine, every day stuff. And if we don't answer (yunno, cuz we're busy working), they'll keep calling. And calling. One right after the other until one of us answers just to make the ringing stop. Or we unplug the phone.
Reception
We have one main radiology desk where patients check in and then are sent to the relevant departments. There's one girl who is dumber than a box of rocks. She always puts in wrong orders and is generally clueless. Even just looking at her face you can tell nothing is going on upstairs. I cringe if I call the desk and she answers because then I'll have to call back later, hope someone else picks up, and hope she didn't fark things up too badly.
We also call them if we finish early and leave so they can keep an eye on our electronic ordering system until call officially starts. The other day a STAT scan was ordered between the techs leaving and the official start of call, no one was called in for it, and yet it was our fault.
Transport
Some of our transporters are awesome. Others are lazy turds. It doesn't help that there are rarely more than two for the entire hospital at any given time, but certain ones you just know aren't going to do jack. I deal with radiopharmaceuticals that are only good for a couple hours before they decay beyond the approved range. And yet this scenario is depressingly common: one patient on the transport list sits for over an hour before they mosey up to the floor and take their sweet time getting the patient to us. For a STAT scan. And then the same happens on the return trip. I get things happen (chasing down a chart, medications or blood running, potty accidents, etc), but it doesn't happen as often as we end up waiting forever on patients or get fed up and do the transporting ourselves. And we can't always do our own transporting because, hey, we have our own jobs to do.
ER/Nursing
Ugh! Quit sending me patients with no IV access! Yeah, IVs go bad from time to time, but there's no way to not notice one leaking everywhere. And I don't care what your preferred needle gauge and site is, if I have to start a new IV, you get what I put in. There's also no way they didn't notice patients that had bowel movements before they came off the floor. Seriously, I will wait for you to deal with that. Where I work only nurses or CNAs can clean up that sort of thing. I'll help if necessary, but I'm not trained for it.
Doctor's Offices
Oh, fark, doctor's offices.....
I cut the family practice docs a little slack because they don't really know enough about any one thing to always understand what they're ordering. It's the specialists that order specific exams all the time and always fark it up that make me want to shove their stethoscopes somewhere unpleasant.
OrthoDoc occasionally orders a scan we used to do one way, but our protocol changed several years ago. Regardless of how often we tell him we don't do it the old way, he still orders it the old way. And if the order isn't written for excatly what we do, we don't get reimbursed. We have one of his patients coming in this week for this particular exam and it's taken over a week to get a properly written order for it.
TerribleEndocrinologist often orders exams to scan for or eradicate thyroid cancer. And every time we have to call for the correct paperwork, and every time it's like pulling teeth. Funny how AwesomeOncologist always manages to call us ahead of time and send us all the right paperwork.
Billing
Look, I have no idea what the codes are for this stuff. I get an order, I do the exam. ICD-10 has really thrown a monkey wrench into things. For all the crazy things it accounts for, it has at least one colossal failure: multi-day studies.
Frankly, I think we're the only modality that does multi-day exams and no one realized it. In order to be reimbursed, the account numbers have to match the date of service. Which is all well and good for a chest x-ray because that takes two seconds. But we have exams that could go out 96 hours. Or dose one day, come back and scan in a week. So clearly the start and completion dates aren't going to be the same. The only work around we have is to have patients register each day to get new account numbers and then back date the start times on our end, but even that doesn't always work. And it's somehow our problem even though we do everything we've been told to do and have zero training on billing.
Scheduling
Recently we've been having issues with outpatients getting delayed in registration due to not having orders in the system. The order is kindof important, as without it, we can't do our thing. So the brilliant solution the bosses came up with is to have the departments check the system the day prior and make sure all the patients have orders. Instead of getting the scheduling department to actually do their jobs. Because we don't have enough to do.
Also on that note, we get calls all the time from scheduling asking us when our open slots are. It's not so bad when it's an exam we don't do often, but it's grating when it's routine, every day stuff. And if we don't answer (yunno, cuz we're busy working), they'll keep calling. And calling. One right after the other until one of us answers just to make the ringing stop. Or we unplug the phone.
Reception
We have one main radiology desk where patients check in and then are sent to the relevant departments. There's one girl who is dumber than a box of rocks. She always puts in wrong orders and is generally clueless. Even just looking at her face you can tell nothing is going on upstairs. I cringe if I call the desk and she answers because then I'll have to call back later, hope someone else picks up, and hope she didn't fark things up too badly.
We also call them if we finish early and leave so they can keep an eye on our electronic ordering system until call officially starts. The other day a STAT scan was ordered between the techs leaving and the official start of call, no one was called in for it, and yet it was our fault.
Transport
Some of our transporters are awesome. Others are lazy turds. It doesn't help that there are rarely more than two for the entire hospital at any given time, but certain ones you just know aren't going to do jack. I deal with radiopharmaceuticals that are only good for a couple hours before they decay beyond the approved range. And yet this scenario is depressingly common: one patient on the transport list sits for over an hour before they mosey up to the floor and take their sweet time getting the patient to us. For a STAT scan. And then the same happens on the return trip. I get things happen (chasing down a chart, medications or blood running, potty accidents, etc), but it doesn't happen as often as we end up waiting forever on patients or get fed up and do the transporting ourselves. And we can't always do our own transporting because, hey, we have our own jobs to do.
ER/Nursing
Ugh! Quit sending me patients with no IV access! Yeah, IVs go bad from time to time, but there's no way to not notice one leaking everywhere. And I don't care what your preferred needle gauge and site is, if I have to start a new IV, you get what I put in. There's also no way they didn't notice patients that had bowel movements before they came off the floor. Seriously, I will wait for you to deal with that. Where I work only nurses or CNAs can clean up that sort of thing. I'll help if necessary, but I'm not trained for it.
Doctor's Offices
Oh, fark, doctor's offices.....
I cut the family practice docs a little slack because they don't really know enough about any one thing to always understand what they're ordering. It's the specialists that order specific exams all the time and always fark it up that make me want to shove their stethoscopes somewhere unpleasant.
OrthoDoc occasionally orders a scan we used to do one way, but our protocol changed several years ago. Regardless of how often we tell him we don't do it the old way, he still orders it the old way. And if the order isn't written for excatly what we do, we don't get reimbursed. We have one of his patients coming in this week for this particular exam and it's taken over a week to get a properly written order for it.
TerribleEndocrinologist often orders exams to scan for or eradicate thyroid cancer. And every time we have to call for the correct paperwork, and every time it's like pulling teeth. Funny how AwesomeOncologist always manages to call us ahead of time and send us all the right paperwork.
Billing
Look, I have no idea what the codes are for this stuff. I get an order, I do the exam. ICD-10 has really thrown a monkey wrench into things. For all the crazy things it accounts for, it has at least one colossal failure: multi-day studies.
Frankly, I think we're the only modality that does multi-day exams and no one realized it. In order to be reimbursed, the account numbers have to match the date of service. Which is all well and good for a chest x-ray because that takes two seconds. But we have exams that could go out 96 hours. Or dose one day, come back and scan in a week. So clearly the start and completion dates aren't going to be the same. The only work around we have is to have patients register each day to get new account numbers and then back date the start times on our end, but even that doesn't always work. And it's somehow our problem even though we do everything we've been told to do and have zero training on billing.
Comment