Before someone checks out, somebody should check in.
An outpatient pain-management clinic that keeps running whether you are watching or not. Patients arrive, phones ring, the schedule slips. You can watch it happen — or take the provider's chair and find out how the day goes when it is yours.
Are you going to check in?
What you are looking at
A clinic, not a menu
Patients have charts, histories and follow-ups. The front desk has a queue, phones that hang up, and copays to collect. Nothing waits politely for you.
Reasoning you can get wrong
Take a history, examine, order imaging — then decide. The chart can disagree with the patient, and treating the picture instead of the person costs you.
A procedure suite
Time-out, positioning, the C-arm, the target zone. Diagnostic blocks that have to read positive twice before an ablation is anything but a guess.
People who run out
Your team has a day too. You can stop and ask how it is going — and it costs you the minutes it would really cost.