How One Auditor Beats Boredom and Maintains a Positive Outlook at Work

I have over 30 years’ experience in the healthcare industry. During that time, I’ve experienced workplace stress, boredom, frustration and a whole host of other challenges. No matter where you work, you’ll experience similar stresses, political environments, competition, and difficult people. You can’t escape that. Sure you could work at home, but after a while it gets lonely. I know, I’ve done that too.

Avoid Negativity

It’s important to avoid negativity at work. For job stress, political agendas and difficult people, I wear headphones. They help me stay out of the drama and avoid unnecessary gossip. Unfortunately, it can be easy to be sucked into drama or gossip. After all, we want to have friends at work and sometimes those friends will talk about others. Another way to stay out of it, is select friends wisely. Should those friends choose to be gossipy or mean spirited, I’ve learned to say “I don’t want to be part of this” and walk away. It’s hard to do at first, but with practice, it gets easier. If your work friends don’t get the message to leave you out of these types of conversations, you may need to separate yourself from them. Don’t allow yourself to be guilty by association. Hopefully, you standing tall and refusing to be brought into that type of conversation or behavior will lead to them following your example. Never feel afraid or embarrassed when it comes to rising above things or speaking your mind.

Don’t Get Lonely

When working from home, I try to find ways to socialize and get involved with other coders and auditors (local chapter meetings work great for this). All the same rules apply with chapter meetings or outside friends, I keep it positive. Our world is too small for negative garbage.

Beating Boredom

For on the job boredom, I listen to music at work. I have lots of music and radio apps on my phone. I also listen to books and webinars. Someone asked me recently how can I listen and work? It’s easy with practice. When we purchase webinars, we usually get access to listen multiple times. So I listen at work, letting it play in the background, and then when I’m ready to take the test at home, I listen again. I also set reminders in my phone to get up and walk. During breaks, I walk around the block or go to a small park nearby where they have ducks.

You might be wondering, what do you do when the job itself gets boring? Well, there are ways to prevent yourself from getting bored in the first place. When I first started and was a file clerk, I was too busy to be bored. But looking back at it, the work itself was dull. Nowadays in auditing and documentation improvement, I’m educating a lot and that’s fun. The auditing can be tedious (and boring for some) so to keep it more interesting for me, I do research. If the note has a condition I’m not super knowledgeable about, I research it. Prior to educating, I review my materials and look to see if there’s anything new I can add to it. Prior to auditing, I double check all my guidelines and make sure there were no new changes. It might sound boring to read and re-read the same guidelines over and over again, but it’s all about perception. I look at it as a learning opportunity, because every time I read the guidelines, I pick up a small but interesting new tidbit of information.

When on the job boredom hits, switch into learning mode. Try to think back to when you first decided to be a coder and relearn an old skill, or learn a new skill. Do research and educate yourself. Look for areas of improvement. Is there something you could be doing differently or better? Try new methods and if you find they save time or make the process easier, recommend changes to your management. AAPC offers some great webinars for additional training. And there are also great articles available on the site. Healthicity has some great webinars that are free without a CEU and low-cost if you purchase the CEU. Look at health insurance plans, such as CMS, they offer a lot of online training that’s free. For instance, Palmetto GBA has an entire section on E&M codes and training. While you won’t get CEUs, you’ll get a lot of great information. When I’m trying to learn about diseases, I use only reputable sites such as the American Diabetes Association, the Merck manual is available online for overall disease information. While the ADA provides specifics on diabetes.

And if all of the above fails, take a day–or five–off. Sometimes a break is what we really need.

Editor’s note: We did not ask her to reference our resources, or those of AAPC, but we do appreciate it. Thanks for the post, Kristin.