Dee Martin
Central Scheduling, 5/19/20
You know, I’m okay, I’m thankful that I’m working from home. But I’ve got two children who are frontliners, so that’s been scary. My daughter is a cashier at Market Basket. She’s twenty-one. My son is eighteen, and is working as a grocery pickup and delivery person for Walmart. My husband works in construction. He’s a mason, so he’s in Boston, he’s everywhere, but he’s been able to be safely distant for the most part, except in the car.
I’ve been working from home for over a year, since before this all happened, so this wasn’t a hard transition. But it’s different jobs we’ve had to take on which have been a bit of a challenge. We are doing COBs, fixing the wrong insurance, added to auth and denials files, calling insurance companies and figuring out why charges were denied. It’s a lot more than just scheduling now. That’s a big challenge for the thirteen of us. We’re not familiar with the billing side, they’re asking questions that, you know, we’re not sure of the lingo, so navigating through that has required a steep learning curve. It’s a challenge because we don’t know the verbiage that they’re looking for. All of us cried for a couple days, we were really worried about messing up and losing the place a bunch of money! I reached out to a bunch of people for help, but we just kept getting the same job aide. One coworker, she called out in the middle of the week because she was so totally stressed about it. I reached out to my manager, who got me hooked up with a Webex that taught me how to do a bunch of this, but then I was the only one who knew about it, so I let the other people know. I tell everyone just to keep escalating up the chain if they’re not getting a helpful answer – Zailee, she’s fantastic, she responds instantly, don’t be afraid to go to her.
I’ve been helping the schedulers get the support they need. A lot just need reassurance, honestly. I tell them take one day at a time, like when we didn’t have a date to come back to the office yet. A lot of my coworkers have issues with procedures so they reach out to me for that stuff too. I like to help my fellow schedulers. A lot of them are pretty worried about how safe things will be when we have to come back, so we’ve made a list of issues to talk to management about to make sure the place is ready. Things like about the air circulation, it’s pretty dry and stale in there, it isn’t too good. And there’s not a lot of bathroom space. There’s also a lot of parents in our group, and there aren’t a lot of daycare options. People don’t know what they’re going to do with their kids. [NOTE: see the mass.gov childcare website or the current list of Emergency Childcare options.]
We know the return to work after June 30th will be phased, but we don’t know who will be first in line, how they will do it. The list we compiled will help. A lot of people in my pod just had babies, one had RSV virus and so she’s worried about coming in, getting it, giving it to her child who is just getting over that.
I have to say as stressful as its been, the way at the start of this whole thing that they got everyone home that could go home was pretty impressive. It happened so fast! They figured out they had to do it, that it was the right thing to do, and bam, they made it happen. It made me feel proud to work here – that they weren’t just taking care of the patients, they were taking care of the people who take care of the patients.
Right now I’m most worried about my children and my grandchildren. I worry about my children every day. You know how it is. Unfortunately, but sort of fortunately, my oldest is laid off because she’s a bus driver. My 21 year-old is doing all the shopping for them. Her kids, my grandkids, have health problems, so if they got it I worry that they wouldn’t survive it. So we’re really praying for them every day. My son is a senior and we were really looking forward to his graduation, we’re really going to miss that.