Our office itself is an independent, single practitioner, out-patient Internal Medicine/Family Practice clinic, but to be able to provide the best service to her patients, my wife finds it valuable to maintain privileges at the local hospital.

Fairly recently said hospital was acquired by a larger hospital system , which has required my wife to go through a whole new process of credentialing in order to continue those privileges. Late last week we were informed the process includes a site inspection of our office by a team from the new hospital system.

We’ve had inspections before by the local fire department as well as several of the insurance providers we’re contracted with, but the list of items the hospital wanted to check on was significantly more extensive than those previous inspections, and we were given less than a week's notice to prepare. Equipment had to be checked, documentation written and updated, ducks had to be herded into rows, and in some cases glued down to keep them from subsequently wandering off.

I say all this chiefly to express my gratitude to my Office Manager for all her hard work, which garnered us an easily passing rate of 96%, only getting dinged for not having specialized equipment an office our size would never have, and because the handicap sigil in the designated parking space out front had faded to the point of non-existence (an issue which will be pointed out to our landlord whose responsibility it is to maintain).

The other reason I'm writing this is to bookmark for myself how satisfying it was at the end of the inspection to realize how far the office has come from the chaos which had characterized most of our history. The inspectors fairly breezed through the office, able to find and identify all the many things on their list quickly and easily, whether it related to emergency or safety equipment, policies or documentation, or the general operation of our facility and staff.

There were so many years where it felt like everything was just hanging by a thread, despite exhausting amounts of physical and mental effort. The toll the business has taken has been much more than we expected or planned for. Now, though, we stand poised to reap the rewards of all the hard work, even if it’s coming later than we wanted, and to move into a new stage of our lives with actual hope and joy.

Next up, identifying and incorporating all the incentivized bits of tracked data required by Medicare Advantage plans into our in-house programs. At least that'll have me writing code rather than policies and procedures.