We have an employee. She has given me a ration of shit about HIPAA before - as in "we must shred everything and block all computers and enforce a ten foot rule or we will be SUED OUT OF EXISTENCE" and no amount of "I have designed HIPAA-compliant healthcare facilities for 10,000 employees before" discussion will shut her up. Every patient she sees generates a chart. That chart must be in our system to comply with the Health Insurance Portability & Accountability Act - the "P" is not "privacy" it's "patients deserve to be able to get their documents out of your system and into someone else's because it's their health goddamn it." We discovered that the fog of war around COVID had allowed her to not do (checks notes) 550 charts. All sorts of sympathy, all sorts of workarounds, all sorts of offers to help, she could not do enough charts to get ahead of the ones she generated with new patients. Then she decided to go "fix up a rental" across country over christmas and new years. She didn't ask, she told. I watched that woman's IP address on her work computer sit in the f'n French Quarter a block from the celebrations for six days. So we told her she needed to knock down 80 charts a week or we'd can her ass and she wouldn't get any new patients until she did.

She knocked 80 down in two days.

So now we're at "you're clearly motivated by intimidation where empathy and understanding don't work so you've got until you're done with your charts to figure out how you can be a team player without us holding a gun to your head 'cuz this is not even vaguely how we want to run a business."

It's fucking tiresome.

One of our patients is a DEI consultant. We had to fire an African-American first-year student for being a racist bitch to one of our midwives. Then we decided to pay this DEI consultant $5k to give us a DEI course. His take-away was "do the work" even though I specifically asked him for action items. After all this, I said "okay well you're telling us that we're doing the right thing through our diverse hiring practices and since you're a member of one of the communities you say is most in need of inclusion, how did we reach you, exactly? Because we need to do more of that obviously." He hemmed and hawed and then said "because you had an African-American midwife on your website." Not "student" - "midwife." "And she is well known in the community." She has 10k Instagram followers and doesn't know how to do a goddamn IV. Never mind that we flat-out told him that the principle reason we were bringing him in was bullshit around this racist woman we had to can - and never mind that his "other favorite midwife" is the woman she was racist towards. So I asked him "it sounds like you're telling me the best way to reach minorities is to performatively feature excess minorities on my website." He laughed but didn't answer.

It's fucking tiresome.

Friend of my wife's is also a midwife. Has an assistant whose husband dropped dead in the middle of the night from a heart attack, having only had a mild case of COVID. So I took a pulse-ox, sent it to my doctor and said "I just want a damn EKG." Skeptically, they let me take an EKG, which came back telling them that for all intents and purposes I'm recovering from a heart attack. So now the office that wouldn't give me a COVID test and fought me for two weeks over an antibody test has me getting a chest X-ray, a sleep study, a lung functional test, an echocardiogram and gawd knows what the fuck else. Which, of course, I get to coordinate. What they're going to do, of course, is notice I've gained fifteen pounds and sent me back to the nutritionist who made me gain 20. When I told my PCP that the endocrinologist she referred me to refused to see me, she shrugged.

It's fucking tiresome.