Eunice Sheridan

I attribute my success to having a father that believed in me. As a young child, as a teenager, he told me that I was going to go to college no matter what. No matter what it took, I was going to go to college. At the high school here in Floresville, back in my day when I graduated in '71, my high school principal and my dad were best friends, and my school counselor and my dad were best friends. So I was cornered! I had to be a good girl. My father and my high school counselor took me under his wing, and he said, I'm going to show you the ropes so you can take the courses that you need to take in high school, so that way you can go to college. I said, well, Mr. Leikness, I don't know if we can afford it. He said, we will get you there, no matter what. I said, okay, whatever you say. And it worked. My father was my biggest supporter, and having people who believed in me and pushed me to succeed made all the difference.

The best career advice I ever received was when I was hired by TMF, Texas Medical Foundation. The instructor who trained us on how to do the job was an RRA, a Registered Record Administrator (now called RHIA), and she had been in the field for some time. She was excellent at training. Everything I learned at school, plus what she taught, is what has helped me and provided me the basis for my job. That foundation of thorough training and learning from an experienced professional who knew how to teach the work properly has stayed with me throughout my entire 45-year career.

I would tell her to keep striving as hard as she can and to be accountable for her work. Be present at all times. If she sees something wrong, speak up, but in a good way, not in a bad way. Show that you know what you're talking about. If you're going to speak about something, have your I's dotted and T's crossed before you say anything. Make sure you have backup for what you're saying. You have to start at the bottom and work your way up, work the trenches, and learn from the bottom and work up. It takes years of experience, and you need to keep up with what's going on every day in the medical field, because it literally changes every day. If you know your stuff, stick to your guns, and talk to doctors the way you're supposed to talk to them, professionally and with confidence in your knowledge.

The biggest challenges in my field right now are the ever-changing guidelines and payer guidelines. What's good and what's not, what's acceptable and what's not acceptable, it literally changes constantly. We base our work on provider documentation, and if you've ever worked in the medical field and worked with doctors, you know they think they're a special breed. Getting proper documentation from physicians is an ongoing challenge. We've also moved from coding straight out of coding books to using encoders, computers, and computer-assisted coding (CAC), which is based on natural language processing. The system reviews the record in the background and assigns codes, but we have to validate what the system picks out. Most of the time the CAC picks up unspecified codes, but if you review a record, you know you're going to find the acuity and specificity of a diagnosis. Some coders are just strictly accepting what the CAC has given them, but we have to go back and validate that. Keeping up with technology while maintaining coding accuracy and specificity is a constant challenge.

My values in work are integrity and being accountable for the work that I do. I believe in doing things right and standing behind my work with confidence. For my personal life, it's family values, literally just family. I spend my downtime with my grandchildren - I've got a 17-year-old, a 13-year-old, a 10-year-old, and a 2-year-old. Every weekend, my husband and I drive an hour and a half to attend my grandson's baseball games. They keep us busy and they keep us young. Family is what matters most to me outside of work.