Welcome to the March Madness Newsletter!
As is my process, I wait until inspiration hits me before I sit down to write the blog for our monthly newsletter. This month we, like every other behavioral health and medical provider in the country have a real reason to be angry this March, thus the title March Madness is truly appropriate.
On Feb. 21 Optum reported “enterprise-wide connectivity” issues early in the morning. Later in the day, Optum said Change Healthcare was experiencing a network disruption due to a cybersecurity threat, and it immediately disconnected Change’s systems after the attack was discovered. This cyber attack had a ripple effect that effectively shut down all payments from Presbyterian Health Plan, Western Sky, and United/Optum. The three combined make up a large majority of our revenue from insurance companies. Serna Solutions went three and a half weeks without knowing when we would receive any payments from these organizations.
To say that owning and running a business is difficult, stressful and a wild roller coaster does not quite capture it. Elon Musk once said, “Running a start-up (business) is like chewing glass and staring into the abyss. After a while, you stop staring, but the glass chewing never ends.” Although I do not resonate with the “chewing glass” metaphor, I have stared into the abyss many times since Serna Solutions became a behavioral health agency on November 20th 2019. When I’m waiting for a contract to be approved, waiting for some bureaucrat to approve an invoice, or when an insurance company has stopped paying us because they were hacked by a ransomware gang.
To make a behavioral health business work, money is always running behind the services that you provide. We receive reimbursement for services that we provide, which is an extremely difficult business model. Before we can expect to receive any payment from a counseling service we have to have paid for an office, phone system, internet, electronic health record system, insurance, a credentialing and billing company, and a period of paid training and on-boarding for the provider. In other words, we invest thousands of dollars just to prepare to deliver the service of psychotherapy.
This business model is at times absurd, and it is the madness that all behavioral health providers deal with every day. Since the money always appears much later than the time that you provide the service, and our costs are on a fixed schedule that does not care about which entity owes you money, any disruptions in that timeline can add create havoc. Que the abyss again.
Of course, it is not all chewing glass and abyss gazing. Truthfully, the story of Serna Solutions is a wonderful success and continues to be so despite the hiccups and gasps. We have grown from just one employee (me) and three contractors in 2019 to twenty-three employees seven contractors and growing every month! Today we are serving more people than ever in multiple locations across the state of New Mexico, making a real difference in people lives every single day. I have realized a dream; to make a living while making an impact, while creating the type of organization that I would have loved to work in as an employee.
That success aside, I found myself staring into the abyss once again last week and checking our mailbox maybe a little too often looking for checks.
I’m not certain, but I bet that the hackers who attacked the Change Healthcare’s system were not thinking about how it might impact our ability to help our clients. I’m sure that they were not thinking about disrupting our ability to help a grieving child who has lost one of their parents, an adolescent who is trying to find a way to deal with life without being under the influence of drugs, or the professionals who for the first time in their lives decide to work on the trauma that has been locked into their mind, body and spirit – holding them back from finding love and peace in their lives.
On March 15 we received the first batch of checks in the mail from Presbyterian, with every indication that they would catch back up on their payments over the following week. I can once again turn away from the abyss and instead look at all of the important and meaningful work that still needs to be done, and all of the amazing staff at Serna Solutions who are doing it.
-Brian
Staff Feature – Sinay Alvarez, Lead Office Administrator, Santa Fe
Serna Solutions extends heartfelt gratitude to all who nominated us for the 2024 edition of the Santa Fe Reporter’s “Best of Santa Fe” in the category of “Best Mental Healthcare Provider.” Your unwavering support has been invaluable in our pursuit of excellence in mental health care.Being considered for this recognition is a testament to our commitment to providing empathetic care and pioneering approaches within our community. A nomination would mean the world to us and help validate the work we do within our community.As we embark on the next phase of this journey, we kindly ask for your continued support by voting for us starting on April 1st. Your votes will further bolster our mission to effect positive change in mental health care.