If you're not making use of this tool to prevent coding and billing mistakes, now is the time to do so If you remember the 1980s, you will very well remember that notorious story about the hair band Van Halen. They were so high-maintenance that they demanded their dressing room always has a bowl of M&M's and that those M&M's could never be brown. Van Halen at least once cancelled a show as David Lee Roth found brown M&M's in his dressing room.
But David Lee Roth isn't quite the prima donna we all thought he was. The no-brown-M&M's clause in their contract was in actuality a matter of life and death. With huge crowds, heavy equipment, electricity and other complex hazards, rock-n-roll shows can be hazardous if the venue doesn't set them up correctly. "While walking backstage, if I laid my eyes on a brown M&M in that bowl, well, we'd line check the entire production. You'd find a problem for sure," Roth wrote in his memoir Crazy from the Heat.
Surgeon Atul Gawande notes in his new book The Checklist Manifesto that David Lee Roth had a checklist.
Gawande says that in surgery and in many other fields, we know more than ever before: "The reason why our failures remain frequent is increasingly evident: The volume and complexity of what we know has crossed our individual ability to deliver its benefits correctly, safely or reliably."
Gawande argues that under conditions of complexity, not only are checklists a help but are required for success as well.
So do be shy about pasting those checklists on your monitor, in the margins of your books, or in the 'personal notes' segment of your billing software. And do not be uncomfortable about making sure your office follows through. Medical coding is at least as complex as surgery or rock-and-roll for that matter, and you need all the help you can get.