The simplicity of acknowledging faults

I spent my entire work day on a wild goose chase for my CFO yesterday. Now I’m way behind in my work, I’ll probably have to come in during the weekend to catch up on it. And it accomplished nothing! The answer I gave to him on Monday off the top of my head was very simple, but he wanted me to double-check it. I did, then he wanted me to explore more avenues to disprove it. But neither me, nor my boss (the Comptroller) could find anything except the simple answer I gave to him days ago!

Everyday there’s a report emailed out to see how productive the hospital as a whole, and each department, is for the current month to date. And honestly right now it’s not looking good. When a stat is not looking good, the cell is colored in red. So there’s a lot of red in the report. That’s what my CFo wants to know, why is there so much red? And the simple answer: The volume of cases is down. Which means business for our hospital is down.

The productivity will look bad when comparing the hours of labor (which has been normal) put in to a lower volume of patients

Not good enough, double-check if the reporting system is miscalculating. Checked with them, no it’s not

Not good enough, double-check if the new charging system that went live last week is a factor. The stats before and the stats after were just as red and the stats are calculated uniformly

Not good enough, print two reports for each department (there’s over 50 in question). Each of those two reports will split into two different time frames, so print two different date ranges each for those two reports for each department. Check if each day the volume shown on each report for each department matches the volume the reporting system showed each day this month

After that, check if each charge code for each department used prior to the new charging system going live was used again after it went live

There’s just so many flaws in his attempt to disprove the bad stats. For one, the charging system went live for 8 days now. How is tracking each charge code (and there are thousands) going to prove anything? In an eight-day span, the hospital will not perform every surgery possible and use every supply possible. Seeing a code not being used doesn’t prove anything! It’s a half-truth. Just like if the previous days they didn’t use a code and they did yesterday. So if one was used after the new system went live but not before, what does that say?

moral of the story: I’ve always liked numbers because they’re simple and proven. If I held two quarters, I have 50 cents. But as my career has progressed, and I’ve seen ethics skew these numbers to enhance them or degrade them, I’m starting to believe in this myth I’ve been told about by math majors in college that a long formula exists that proves two equals zero. I guess if I held two quarters, I’d have no money

Have a Nice Day!