The Perplexities of Working with Government Agencies

Here's a bit of irony. I work in a large hospital. I take care of patients records. Three years ago, we began scanning the patients hand-written chart documents so they would be available on all the hospital PC's. We have two California state government agencies that pay us for certain health care services we provide. Let's just call them MCal and CCS. To decide if they are going to pay us for the services we have provided, these California state government employees need to review the patients records.

CCS is adamant that we provide full access to ALL the scanned patients records for their review. They are unhappy that we limit their access to ONLY the patient records they NEED to see. They don't like that because the way the system limits their access to only certain patient records makes getting to the patients online record a little more cumbersome. They say if they don't have full and unencumbered access to records, it will slow them down and cause their payments to us to suffer.

MCal on the other hand does not want to use the computer at all to view records. They want us to print out all the records that we have scanned and provide large stacks of paper to them each day for review. We've recently had some success getting them to review some records online. But they complain that the computer is too slow, and if we required them to use the computer instead of paper, it will slow them down and cause their payments to us to suffer.

To recap -

CCS says, "We need the records online, and since you can't provide them to us the way we want them, your reimbursements will suffer."

MCal says, "We need the records to be paper, and since you can't provide them to us the way we want them, your reimbursements will suffer."

Keep in mind these are both government agencies. I'm not trying to bash government agencies, but I think you can see my frustration! What is the world coming to?!?!