Written By: Lauren Howard
“You’re like a Medicare encyclopedia.”
It was a bizarre compliment, but not for obvious reasons.
Not because it was rude or offensive. It made me laugh both because it was funny and because, well, life is funny.
This was never the goal. I’m not complaining. I LOVE what I do. I love what I do in ways that I can’t even believe.
But for years, I stayed away from government programs. I didn’t know the first thing about them. I built in a totally different world, and I had to call in the people who knew better when it came to building in this space.
It was never a problem because, pre-pandemic, there wasn’t a whole lot of overlap between Medicare programs and telehealth.
Then COVID brought us a whole new reality and a world where government programs were willing to figure it out. I went from knowing very little about it to knowing, like, everything. Or knowing how to figure it out.
I can do the enrollments. I can tell you how to enroll each of your providers and in what locality. I can tell you how to stay inside the lines. I can interpret the guidance for you. I can set up your EDIs with your clearinghouses. I can predict when your claims payments are going to hit your bank accounts. I can explain nightmare PTAN situations and how to avoid them. I can freaking manually bill out all your claims if I need to.
Because I have.
Life is funny that way.
To get that acknowledgment without prompting from someone who was paying me for all of this expertise that I can’t really tell you where I got . . . well, it was funny.
It was a lot of things. Funny was just one of them. Shocking, affirming, and extraordinary were others.
There is no way to predict where your career will take you. Five years ago, I never would have believed this would be where mine was headed, but I wouldn’t change a thing.
Founder & CEO at elletwo
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