Representative

What is a Patient Services Representative?

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• published: 01 Apr 2015
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Every day, our patient services representatives make sure the right patients are placed in the right rooms, piecing together the puzzle that is MD Anderson’s 667-bed inpatient hospital. Imagine you’ve been assigned to work on one of those jigsaw puzzles that dot the tables in our patient waiting areas. Hundreds of tiny pieces lie scattered on the table. Your job is to sift through them and finish the puzzle. But there’s a catch: a colleague will sit beside you removing some pieces, rearranging others and occasionally handing you several at once that all look the same. Our 15 full-time and three part-time patient services representatives face a similar task every day, except the puzzle is MD Anderson’s 667 inpatient beds and the pieces are patients who need to be admitted. “Our ultimate goal is getting the right patient in the right bed the first time,” says Lenda Narcisse, a patient resources manager who started working here as an admissions clerk more than 35 years ago. While getting a patient in a room sounds pretty straightforward, the reality is much more complicated. “When a patient shows up I’d love to be able to say, ‘Welcome to MD Anderson, let us escort you to your room,’ but that just doesn’t happen,” she says. There’s a lot of collaborating and puzzle-piecing that goes on behind the scenes, often before a patient ever steps foot in the door. First, a bed has to be available. And not just any bed. If a patient requires post-surgery telemetry or rehab, is recovering from a nuclear medicine procedure involving radioactive iodine or needs specialized care and accommodations for, say, a stem cell transplant, then that patient must be assigned to a bed on a floor with specialized clinical staff and equipment. Patient services representatives have to keep constant tabs on our overall census and know which beds are available where. They also need to know what type of diagnosis or treatment a patient has been given so they can make an appropriate bed assignment. That’s where Linda Bush’s crash course in basic anatomy and physiology comes in handy. As part of the patient service representatives’ eight-to 12-week training, the nurse and inpatient admissions manager teaches a one-day course that covers basic anatomy, medical terminology and some of our specific surgical procedures. “We deal with diagnoses constantly, and it makes a big difference to where the patient goes,” Bush says. “Imagine coming here with no medical training and all of a sudden you’re assigning patients to floors when you don’t know what their diagnoses or treatments mean.” Bush’s nursing team in Admissions works closely with the patient services representatives to help make those connections and oversee final patient placement decisions. There are a hundred ways to become an inpatient at MD Anderson, from scheduled services and hospital transfers to coming in through the Emergency Center. Patient services representatives are trained to understand them all, prioritize them and sift through the pieces to find the ones that fit as quickly as possible. They’re also trained to collect and verify admission data, such as demographics and insurance information, comply with Joint Commission and Medicare regulations covering patient rights and advance directives, and ensure patient armbands are correct and properly placed. Laura Gonzalez has been a patient services representative for more than 17 years. She’s an expert on hospital transfers and helps train new employees. First, she says, we have to get both medical acceptance and financial clearance on non-emergent transfers and make sure we’re not on divert status (a fancy way of saying “no vacancies”) so there’s actually an appropriate bed available for that patient. And for emergent or urgent conditions, patient services representatives work with Ron Walters, M.D., associate vice president for Medical Operations and Informatics, and Michael Ewer, M.D., special assistant to the vice president, Medical Affairs. Walters says he often receives 30 to 40 requests a day to approve emergency admissions, and he says it takes a special person to deal with the competing pressures of patient needs and physicians’ demands under the overarching pressures of finances and insurance. Maria Galindo, who’s been a patient services representative for more than 20 years, says she feels lucky to work with a group of caring, compassionate people who are determined to make a difference in the lives of patients. “I always promise that I’ll do my best, even if that means moving heaven and earth to get patients a room,” she says. And that’s the best part – getting to the end of a shift and having every patient in a bed, receiving the best possible care. The puzzle, for that moment, is complete.