First off, I want to say I am not a disgruntled employee. I had no negative personal experiences with the company or management (others have). I was just sold on a job that is nowhere near what it actually is. I want to save others from making the same mistakes. Now to the downsides:
1. Tasks include chatting with patients, coordinating care, tracking down your own medical records and any other clerical work that keeps you busy from actually providing patient care. For the most part, you don’t manage any medical conditions, unless you are on call. You can take a more active role, but you are doing so with limited info or resources. A lot of times no labs, no imaging, no records.
2. This was sold as a palliative care program. It is NOT that. What it really is: being a risk adjuster while trying to keep people from utilizing hospital or ED/UC facilities. They make it sound really wonderful, but the relationship with BCBS and Stella means that our only value is saving insurance money.
3. Management likes to act like they care about those who have boots on the ground, but they don’t. They will spring a change on you and expect you to implement it within the week. They don’t care about feedback, even though they pretend to. They shut down feedback in meetings. They act personally offended when discussing concerns and suggestions.
4. Speaking of change. Change happens every week. Change fatigue is real and alive within this company. And it won’t stop in the near future. They can’t even keep up with the changes they just made, before they are changing things again. It’s like whiplash. They act first, think later.
5. Call is optional, but strongly encouraged. A provider is available 24/7 and needs to be able to go see a person on the spot. You have a warm transfer, so you HAVE to take the call immediately when the patient calls. There is no window or buffer to call them back. And if you don’t answer management gets the call within 3-5 minutes. The answering service will call you every 30 seconds until you answer. So you dare not go to the bathroom without your phone.
6. Patients ask what we do or can do for them and I literally don’t have an answer for most of them. We don’t even know what we do. How are we supposed to tell them what we do. But we are NOT palliative care.
7. The focus is ONLY saving $$$$. NOT patient care.
8. You will become a sales person. You have to sell Livio to the patient. They don’t want you to take no for an answer. They continuously call patients, even when they decline our service. They give you sales pitches and “scripts” to say to patients.
Beware of this job. It is not what you expect. And so many people are being hired without full knowledge of what this program really is.
