Instead of writing lyrical, thought-provoking posts about the uplifiting experiences of being a doctor, I find myself preoccupied with billing statements, cash flow, accounts receivable, and countless other details essential to the robust health of medical organizations.
You see, not only am I a hospitalist at my teeny rural community hospital, but I am also the treasurer of our 5-person hospitalist group. That makes me our de facto Chief Financial Officer, a job title which is the source of great merriment among all who know me. For most of my adult life I've managed to keep money in the bank, bounce very few checks, build an excellent credit score, and get my taxes paid on time. It isn't much to brag about, but among my group, this was enough to get me elected treasurer, so I inherited the bank statements, the invoicing software, and the direct line to our billing company. Lucky me.
This may astonish you, but running the finances of a corporation--even a miniature corporation, like our hospitalist group--is slightly more complex than running a household's finances, although only slightly. It does, however, involve more people, more email, more phone calls, and more MONEY than the average household does, and worse, it involves payroll. Every month I have to make payroll for all five docs, and this is both stressful for them and for me, because our payroll depends on a) how much money we collect that month for patient encounter, and b) receiving a stipend from our hospital. Both of these events have Baroque processes that I can't bring myself to explain here. Suffice it to say that making payroll is a nail-biting event every month, but we've managed it without actually exchanging blows so far.
I doubt many doctors anticipated how much money management would be involved in the job, either working out their personal cash flow or expanding out into their organization's financial arrangements as well. Sometimes I think I need an MBA, other times a CPA seems like a good idea. If I had only borrowed a couple of lectures from pathology, I might have squeezed some more basic accounting principles into my professional education. As it is, recent struggles to make payroll and keep money in the group's bank account make the worst call night seem easy in comparison.
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