A couple of days ago, I presented for the first hour of a meeting for the Mid York Medical Accounts Management Association, of which I'm a board member and 2-time president. Once I was finished, our second presenter, from the New York State Insurance Department, and was going to talk about no fault billing.

About 20 minutes into his presentation, he said something to the group that just didn't sound right. I've been in health care 26 years, and it was the first time I'd heard this bit of information. I actually stopped him and asked the entire room if any of them had heard it before; no one had.

It turned out to be a question that kept coming up over and over, and I'll admit, I was the guy driving a lot of it. I'm intentionally not telling what it is, and you'll know why at the end. Anyway, we all went to lunch, came back from lunch, and learned that it was even being discussed during lunch for a short period of time. He and I had one more conversation about it. He said he was quoting the state's position. I said that it was an illogical position because no one had been doing it, ever.

He finally had an epiphany, and asked the room if anyone was doing what he said we should have been doing. He got nothing. I said that no one had the capability to do it with the current computer systems because no one had ever said it needed to be done, and only for no fault, and that it would take some serious programming to comply with what he'd said. In general, it seems the state had a rule and hadn't verified that anyone was following through on the rule, which is somewhat ridiculous, which also meant they had no clue as to how hospitals and physicians actually send out medical bills.

What he stated finally is that he would be going back to his office and talking with the legal people about it, because trust me our little group isn't alone on this one. It may be a change that we get official confirmation on, or something that they make sure they send out to every hospital in the state, then sit back and wait for the furor.

The reason I knew I had to be persistent about this was that it didn't seem he was understanding what I was trying to get across to him, and since it took almost 2 hours for him to have this sudden understanding, it seems I was correct. It's funny because in my earlier presentation, something I kept saying was that patient accounting staff needs to be taught how to be persistent in getting information they can understand when talking with insurance companies, because they, like everyone else, tends to use insider jargon and assumes everyone else knows it, which they don't always know.

Sometimes, persistence is the best thing a person in business has at their side to get things done properly.