Innovation in the Workplace

One workplace innovation instance, that comes to mind, was while working for a local medical clinic billing office, an idea I came up with. I couldn’t understand why no one had thought of it before. When customers called in to discuss their bills, they would ask what the insurance paid/discounted/didn’t pay. Also, a lot of money wasn’t being posted correctly to patient’s accounts. For instance if the patient came in and paid a $40 copay, but insurance ended up paying their bill in full – money was sitting in their account and no one knew where it was supposed to be posted to. It was the standard to file received EOBs instead of scanning them into the system. So to be proactive, if a patient requested a review of their claims/bill, instead of asking the patient to send in their EOB or calling the insurance company for a copy (which seemed to be easier then actually requesting a copy from our own company archives) – I began to go online and found several insurance company websites that a medical billing company could enroll in by using their tax ID number to view patient’s EOBs. Not only did this save on time, but also on paper. (I truly believe in being paperless as much as possible.) At first, my idea was met by resistance by older co-workers who weren’t as comfortable with utilizing the internet, but then as they realized how much easier it was – it became a normal job function.