PMI Shorts - Episode #2: a conversation with David T. Womack, Jan Hailey, MHL, CMOM, CMC, CMIS, CMCA E/M & Kem Tolliver, CMOM, FACMPE, CPC
David: My name is David Womack, and I am the President and CEO of Practice Management Institute. And today I am joined by Kem Tolliver and Jan Hailey. Kem and Jan are both trainers with PMI, both teach the CMOM curriculum. Today we are going to dive into not-really the CMOM class as much as Kem and Jan's CMOM journey, and how it all began with CMOM. Welcome Kem, welcome Jan.
Kem and Jan: Thanks for having us, David.
David: So initially for those who are not aware, I want to kind of share the CMOM story - how CMOM came about. This year, 2024, we are celebrating the 25th anniversary of CMOM. So, (yeah, exactly), so we're trying to give CMOM its props, tell the story, and to interact with a lot of people that have become CMOM graduates, and low and behold, here's two of our own. So in the early 90's - late 80's early '90s, PMI had our curriculum "How to be the Best receptionist", "how to be the best collector", "office management basics" class, and ICD-9 classes in-the-day, and a variety of things. And a certain segment of our audience reached out and asked, "What's next?" Being in the proverbial "ivory tower," we sat and looked at each other and thought, we really don't have anything for that. So we thought about it, went to the drawing board and created the CMOM curriculum to be kind of an overarching, almost like the last class you take as a college senior it's not gateway,... Is it a capstone? Capstone, that's exactly it, kind of ties all the pieces together, and that's what CMOM was for. We joked internally that CMOM course was going to be for "the person that missed the meeting" that showed up at work one day and said, guess who's the new office manager. That's who this class was designed for. Anyway, Jan and Kem, like I said, we had some fun putting this together - certainly a lot of memories.
Certainly without dating anybody here, you all received your CMOM certification many moons ago.
Kem: Understatement!
David: So Jan, I'm going to start with you. Tell me your CMOM story and where it started for you.
Jan: OK, well I certainly don't mind dating myself, I was actually certified back in 2001, and it seems like yesterday, and other days I can't remember life without certification. But the reason I became a certified medical office manager was the fact that I was coming from an inpatient environment, I had had several years of healthcare experience, but it was all inpatient, it was scheduling, surgery scheduling, admitting, emergency department, and then I moved over to ambulatory setting and realized - this is a whole different ballgame than what I had ever done. And so what I started doing was reaching out to other office managers, some that had been managers for years, and realized they didn't have any more knowledge than I do. And a friend of mine called me to say, hey, I see that the Memorial hospital is sponsoring the Certified Medical Office Manager course, what do you think about it, and I said, I'm signing up for it, really without even knowing exactly what the curriculum was. I took the course, she didn't by the way, and I've never looked back.
But the thing that really drove it home was I feel like I gained the confidence to be able to go back to the office and have the knowledge of knowing what I should be doing and
shouldn't be doing and when to reach out and who to reach out to. But more so than that, is that it really gave me my passion. I found my niche in healthcare. Without it I may still be working inpatient, but instead I found my niche in the ambulatory world and have loved it ever since.
Without it, I might still be working in inpatient. But instead I really found my niche in the ambulatory world and have loved it ever since.
David: That's fantastic! Kem, you've got a different journey.
Kem: Yeah, it's a little different, but it also seems a little familiar, not only to Jan but to a lot of our listeners and our members. I started my career in healthcare outside at a medical practice as a medical receptionist. And, so that was back in the day when we had carbon-copy phone pads and a lot of manual processes, and I think like many of my colleagues, I got on-the-job training and continued to get promoted and taking on new roles and additional responsibilities until I got to the point of office manager. And at that point I started realizing that I had gaps in my skills. And in all the positions that I had mastered up until that point I thought that I knew it all, and I realized when I got into office management that, "oh, you don't know it all." At the time, the medical society in my state, I'll go ahead and throw the name out there, MedChi, which is the Maryland State Medical Society, they do a lot of advocacy for physician practices, and at the time, PMI had been partnering with MedChi, and my Instructor, who I just learned her name, Regina Mixon-Bates was teaching this class, so that was 21 years ago. And I am proud to say that, not only were my skill-gaps filled at that time, but it also gave me a desire to learn more. So it's really an honor to work with folks like Jan and others to present and educate our colleagues, our peers on CMOM educational materials. But it has been a very worthwhile experience for me. I still have my binder from 21 years ago, and something else that's funny that I just realized before we got on. I still have the MapQuest directions on how to get to MedChi.
There is a lot of people that won't know what MapQuest is, that's funny! The old version of Google Maps.
There you go!
Jan: The written version of Google Maps!
David: Exactly! Well, and you know what, another funny story, Jan when we were doing some of the planning for this, you actually remembered...I remembered attending a different one...but you actually remembered attending a review session that was at the hotel where you were staying and a bunch of the group from your class actually got together and huddled before the test the next day.
Jan: We did and that has always stood out to me. I didn't give my location, I'm actually located in Northern Indiana, home of the Fighting Irish of Notre Dame, and we had actually met at a restaurant that was the old Studebaker mansion that was turned into a restaurant and that's where we met and had a study group, and that has always stood out to me because I realized at that moment that it wasn't just me wanting my success, but we were all rooting for each other and helping each other, and everyone brought a little something different to the table, literally, and it was just a great experience all the way around. It was a great instructor and great students in the class.
David: So over this 20+ year period, we all know, MapQuest being one, a lot of things have changed. How is CMOM still relevant today, maybe even more relevant today as it was 20 years ago? Kem I'll let you go first.
Kem: Well, let me first start off by answering that question by foundation. So I credit CMOM as giving me the foundation to stand and stay up-to-date and interpret all of the changes that continuously happen every day, every week, every quarter, every month, every year in healthcare. So I really think that for you to be successful, you have to start with a really solid foundation. And the curriculum that is included in the CMOM certification, it's not just theory and philosophy, it's giving you, you know, real-life, day-to-day operations of how to prepare a medical record, what should be included in a medical record, using formulas for financial management. Now that I have had the pleasure of being a two-time author, I use a lot of those formulas that I learned in my PMI certification to this day! So when you're thinking about the relevance, it really kind of starts with that ground zero, and having that base. Because when you think about 21 years ago, there was no thought of value-based payment models, or pay-for-performance, right? You had the foundation of fee-for-service. The fee-for-service model evolved, and as practice leaders, we also need to continue to evolve. And to do that I think you have to have a solid foundation, and that's what CMOM gave me.
David: That's a really good, that's a great point! Jan, what about your perspective?
Jan: So I think CMOM has evolved through the years, originally when I took the course way back in 2001, I think a lot of the material was geared toward private practice, there were a lot of managers that were running single physician practice offices, or two or three physicians. And as we have moved through the years, a lot of physicians are now working for healthcare systems. So managers may say, why do I need to know this information, we have a finance department, we have an HR department, but I think it's more important than ever to have that information. So I'll take the finance piece, for example. You may have a finance department, but you still have that manager that is in the nitty gritty of every day that needs to know that information. They need to know when they have a salesperson come in, "how do I find if this is something I should be doing or not? How do I find the formula? How many patients need that service? The manager is often the one that recognizes when things start going wrong, long before it ever hits the finance department. And I think that is true in a lot of the different modules. I think it is that way in the HR module: the manager will identify things before even the HR does or the managed care department does. And they also have the knowledge of where they can discuss a budget. They can discuss a contract, and they can then they can educate the physicians which is going to make the practice more successful, whether it is a private practice or part of the healthcare system.
Kem: I want to add something to this; you mentioned relevance. And, it's important as healthcare leaders that we stay relevant and in order for us to stay relevant, we need to understand what's happening in the industry, and not only to understand it but we need to be able to interpret it, we need to be able to educate others, and we need to be able to implement changes in our organizations. So that is another reason this certification is so relevant.
David: Well, I made a note in the planning that CMOM shouldn't be viewed as a destination, it's the very beginning of the journey, and to Jan's point, I think unfortunately a lot of those individual practices that are connected to systems don't realize that it's a dual-edged sword, they're really their own little separate business unit, and the fancy computers back in corporate, man they can rifle in and rifle-shot into your practice anytime they want to, so better make sure your numbers look good. So, finally, I wanted to ask both of you your perspective on not only your career but what you see as far as career opportunities for people that are thinking about becoming a Certified Medical Office Manager. Jan?
Jan: I think there's two things to look at when it comes to certification. One is it's going to advance your career. It's going to really help you decide where you want to go. But then I also think even if you’re not a current office manager, but that's something you are striving for, the certification can help you get there. It's going to give you the skills you need but it's also going to stay updated with the trends, as Kem mentioned, but it will just provide some increased opportunities all the way around. You know, when I think of all the opportunities that I have had over the years, I can relate them back to sitting in that class for those four days, and learning so much that I became so excited about it, you know. Learning about things that I had called other managers and said, how do you do “this,” and they didn't know, and I was like, how could you be doing this for this many years and not know these things! And I think there's lot ah-ha moments and that is "how did I get this far without knowing this?"
David: Kem?
Kem: Piggybacking off of what you just said, Jan, is there's an opportunity when you're together with your colleagues in a certification process, and the classes that I've been able to teach, I really love to see that vulnerability where you know folks are like, "I didn't know that" and being able to learn together. But in terms of my respective career path, I think it's important to be credible. And there are industry leaders that have alphabet soup behind their names, right, that you see all these letters, which is, sometimes it could seem overkill, but when you think about it, they are credible resources; they are subject-matter experts. Why? Because they put the time in to invest in themselves, or their organization or employer put the time into investing in them. So when I think about my career journey as a medical receptionist, I could have never have imagined that I would be working on, refreshing and participating in content development for CMOM certification and writing books and having a being a consultant, and working for myself after having a wonderful career in private practice and in hospital settings. But being credible not only to your clients and the industry - but to yourself. Some of us deal with imposter syndrome. And one of the ways to knock imposter-syndrome on its butt is to have knowledge and be able to stand on that knowledge. And so that is where I see those opportunities coming in.
Jan: And Kem, just to add to that extended knowledge, I think the certifications provide that, because as we all know we have different certifications for different things. But in order to keep that certification, you stay up to the current trends. So when we look back, both of us have been credentialed with CMOM for 20 years. Life is much different now than it was 20 years ago, but it's having that certification. I don't necessarily want to use the word "force”, but I will. It forces you to stay up, it forces you to be relevant in your chosen career path, and so forth. Certification can certainly help you advance and validate skillsets.
Kem: Yeah, I want to point out one other thing that Jan highlighted. The different certifications that some of us go after. That is so critical, and I know that PMI offers different varying certifications which is great, but when you are a practice leader, you need to know everything! You need to be the know-it-all in the practice! You need to understand coding, you need to understand compliance; you need to understand human resources; you need to understand facilities management; and unplugging the toilet, and IT, dealing with, you know, troubleshooting. And, having the motivation, how about we use that word, the motivation to get continuing education units every year, because you need them to keep up your certification, it motivates you to stay knowledgeable.
David: That is a great point. I love that, my takeaway is the foundation; it all starts with that, and I think.
David: Well, I tell you what, certainly, I know people will enjoy listening to you both, I have certainly enjoyed it. This has been as much fun doing as it was planning it. That is not true, planning may have been a little bit more fun. I want to thank both of you for doing this and sharing your stories with our audience. And I certainly look forward to being able to do more of these in the future. I do want to let people know at the tail end of this, whichever end that is, I am going to throw a slide up. Both Jan and Kem have their own businesses and do work in this industry and in this space, and if you'd like to get hold of each of them, I'll put their contact information up at the end of this. Having said that, ladies, have a great day.
Jan: Thanks David, it has been a pleasure.
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