Wow, it?s been one hell of a day.
I think I took my meds too late last night, so I couldn?t get up this morning when my alarm went off. About 8:00, I finally rolled out of bed and into a cup of coffee. Needless to say, this didn?t exactly start my morning off on the right foot.
Less than 10 minutes after I got to work, the manager of our claims department (and wife to the President of the company) came over asking what we were doing with Hospital claims that were electronically received, because one of our clients had called us wondering why their hospital claim payouts for April had dropped like a rock.
Since this was a fairly new thing, we haven?t actually finished implementing the program that loads the received files from WebMD. Our lead programmer, who had been working on the program for weeks, just happens to be on a cruise this week, and therefore inaccessible. The responsibility somehow fell to me. I got a call from the President of the company 5 minutes later asking me why we weren?t running them. I explained to him that supposedly the program for loading them hadn?t been completed yet, and I was waiting for the go-ahead before I started importing them on a regular basis. The conversation went something like this:
Boss: So why aren?t we importing Hospital claims? Me: Because <programmer> hasn?t finished writing the program yet. Boss: Run them anyway. Me: What if it breaks something? Boss: I don?t care, do it anyway. Me: Uhh, ok… If you say so?
Now, just by the grace of god, the program seems to be 99% complete. The only problem I?ve found is that it prints a few things out of order, and it?s missed 30 or so pages out of the approximately 3,000 claims I?ve imported thus far. Simple enough problems, since the actual images of the claims are generated and I can go in and manually print them.
It does make me wonder though? What would have my boss done if I?d run the import and it?d corrupted our database? Honestly, if the programmer who?s designing this program says it?s not done yet, I?m inclined to take his word for it, since we can?t even look at the source code of the program (not that we?d have a clue what all that code meant or did anyway). With an ordinary client-side application that simply rehashes data stored in the database, I wouldn?t care so much if it weren?t yet complete. Chances are it?s not going to do anything that will disturb data on the server anyway. However, since we?re not simply looking at data, we?re inserting it into the database for the entire company to use, and to pay claims off of, I?m significantly more cautious.
In the end, it appears to have worked out alright, but that wasn?t necessarily so. It?s thinking like this that can get people into serious trouble. If this had somehow blown up our database, no one here would have had the specialized expertise to know what it had done to our data. If you ask me, this was a bad call. We?d waited 3 weeks for these things, what?s another couple of days until the programmer got back?
Maybe it?s ?play-it-safe? thinking like that that is the reason I?m not a manager. When it comes down to matters like that, I?m not willing to make the ballsy (stupid?) moves that can either perfectly make or totally break a situation.
It?s just another day in ?paradise??
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