I'll answer to anything....

A funny thing happened yesterday....
Nurse Belinda retrieved a very garbled voice mail message...she was able to barely make out the phone number to return the call, and thought that the caller had said his name was Andy. Well, she called Andy back, and said "May I speak with Andy please?". The man who answered the phone said something that essentially conveyed he was Andy. She explained who she was and that she was returning his call, and inquired about how she could help him. He said he was responding to one of our outreach calls, and she searched in vain to try and find a record for Andy so that she could see what we wanted to talk with him about. After a few seconds of searching she asked him to spell his name and he responded "T O M"....Well, needless to say she was a little bit flustered by this...she asked "then why'd you say yes you were Andy?" He got the better of her, though, because his reply was "Well, I'll answer to anything when a pretty girl is calling". We all LOVED this little anecdote, and thought you might enjoy it too. We thought it was a good example of what we mean when we talk about "building a rapport with our patients"...a little humor goes a long way :-)

By the way - this is Nurse Belinda (she's one of our newer nurses), and she is a pretty girl.

Preparing for this week's "Fireside Chat"

Want to know another thing that makes AIMM special? Did you know that the AIMM staff gather together once a week via Webinar (usually Saturday mornings) and spend time focusing on a single medical management topic? We began doing this recently as a part of our 2010 "New Year's Resolution". So far, everyone has loved it, and we've even opened it up now to key industry partners (brokers, consultants, etc...). So far we have covered the following topics:

• Stop Loss - the who, what, when, where, why, and how
• Behavioral Health Precertifications
• Transitions between levels of care
• Basic AIMM Sales Presentations - what clients hear & expect, and what make AIMM special in the market-place

This week we are covering the topics of:

• Chemotherapy
• Dialysis

Nurse Kelli, the VP of Care Management is presenting the chemotherapy course. I am presenting the dialysis course. In preparation for my portion I am doing some research, and I came across this great article that shows empirically some of the things that we in medical management have strongly suspected for a long time: PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: The study results show that patients in for-profit dialysis facilities tend to receive significantly lower quality of care (average quality score: 0.7588) than those in not-for-profit (0.8764) or government-owned facilities (0.8283) (p<0.05).>

I share this with you because I wonder how many medical management company's invest time ensuring that all their staff are up to speed on these kinds of issues?

Of course, as a part of our dialysis training we will also be talking about renal repricing and other new laws/programs that ensure cost-effectiveness.

If you're interested in joining us, let me know!

Deb