For the first several years of Heritage Health Services’ existence, we provided back office operations to about a dozen mental health therapists. That meant we helped therapists set up their business organization, wrote policies & procedures, created forms, stayed on top of new (and existing) laws & regulations affecting their businesses, billed insurances & co-pays, reconciled incoming payments, chased down unpaid invoices… the list was extensive.
The biggest part of our work was with insurance agencies.
When we started out, working with insurance agencies was fairly straightforward. i was able to collect money that the therapists hadn’t been able to get, partly because I could do the work during the M-F, 9-5 time frame when the insurance companies answered their phones – the exact time that my therapist clients were the busiest, and couldn’t spend half an hour or more on hold waiting to speak with someone who could answer their questions.
But, as the years went on, it all got more and more complicated. And more and more frustrating. My clients often were not getting paid, and when I tried to find out why, the response would be some variation of “Yes, this should have been paid. I’ll send it up to be reviewed. If approved it will take 4-6 weeks for the payment to come through.”
Seriously??
Anyway, this became a daily – and sometimes hourly – occurrence. And it was making me extremely crabby. There was so much work to do, and I often was getting nowhere.
Worse, clients might give us their insurance cards, we’d see that it was a major health insurance that my therapists were credentialed for, but then the payment would get rejected because the insurance company subcontracted out the mental health piece to another company, and that company might not honor the primary insurance’s credentialing of the therapist. (Credentialling essentially means the insurance company has approved that provider as someone to whom they would pay the client’s bills.)
By last fall, I was so frustrated that it was clear my effectiveness was deteriorating rapidly. So I gave up that side of the business.
In the meantime, I’d begun helping out an older couple a few nights a week with meals (all from scratch – no pre-packaged food here!), laundry and other household chores. While this couple’s mental facilities were intact, and often sharper than my own!, physically it was too much for them to handle running a household.
And I loved it.
So, after terminating with my back office ops therapists, I began working more and more with seniors, and before I knew it, had become what is known as an End-Of-Life Doula.
An EOLD is a non-medical person who helps both the dying person and their family with the transition into whatever lies beyond, with hands-on skill and care in the logistics of dying, as well as supporting their emotional and spiritual needs.
I’ve faced down a lot of death in my life, beginning with my mother at the age of 10, working in a nursing home 3 days a week during my last two years in high school, and including my dad, my 2nd husband, and too many friends and employees over the years, as well as a wide assortment of beloved cats, dogs and other companion animals.
So helping my people (as I call them) deal with their own mortality is kind of a natural for me.
I’ll have more on this topic in the future. It’s a tough one that our society doesn’t do well with. I’m still learning myself, but at just a very few years shy of 70, I seem to have found my calling.
Categories: Death & Dying, End Of Life Doula, Grief
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