athenista spotlight: Meet Chris Bassolino
He coordinates athenahealth’s NPI project to ensure clients make a smooth transition on the compliance deadline. How does he have time for this and cooking at his desk, too? Find out in this month’s interview with Chris Bassolino.
athenaPulse: Tell us about your position at athenahealth.
Chris Bassolino: I’m a manager of Process Innovation in Transaction Services. What this means is that I manage “change” within the company - whether it’s a new software upgrade, a new workflow, or a new government mandate. In the case of NPI, it’s all three! As part of this position, I took on the role of NPI project manager about 18 months ago.
aP: What do you do in a typical day at work?
CB: After checking and responding to email in the morning, I’ll usually start a long day of meetings coordinating all of the different sub-teams of the NPI project - client, payer, software, and QA. We also recently created an “NPI War Room” to analyze and triage NPI problems that come up. The war room meets every afternoon from 4pm to as-long-as-it-takes. In my spare time, I’m supervising a large software redesign for the Enrollment Services team.
aP: What do you help clients accomplish?
CB: The change to NPI has the potential to put large portions of healthcare revenue at risk. My job, along with the extremely talented NPI team, is to insulate athenahealth clients from as much of the predicted industry chaos as possible, and ensure a smooth transition through careful setup and rigorous testing and QA.
aP: What’s the most important thing clients need to know about NPIs?
CB: The entire industry is struggling to get ready by the compliance deadline. athenahealth is well ahead of the curve in its implementation of NPI, but even if we do everything perfectly, we’re still dependent on our trading partners - the payers in particular - to adjudicate the claims correctly. We have a comprehensive QA process in place, but clients still need to keep a close eye on their payments and let us know when NPI-related errors are suspected.
aP: What do you think is going to happen after the NPI compliance deadline of May 23, 2007?
CB: Interestingly, last week, CMS published an NPI Contingency Notice granting entities an extra 12 months to become compliant provided that they have been making “good faith efforts” to do so. This seems like a good thing, but it also means that instead of working towards a single compliance deadline, everyone will now face a multiplicity of deadlines from different organizations. In any case, I don’t think there will be complete chaos. I think there will be issues, but I think that they will be more localized instead of generalized. I can imagine that a particular payer or a particular provider may get hit hard due to a software error (given the way that provider numbers are intertwined into the payer-adjudication systems today) but I don’t anticipate an industry-wide meltdown.
aP: What was your first job?
CB: Serving pizza at a Harvard cafeteria. After the ovens shut down for the night I got to mop the floors.
aP: If your office were on fire, what is the one thing you would grab on your way out?
CB: It probably wouldn’t be my laptop.
aP: Your favorite “athenahealth moment”?
CB: Cooking a 7-pound corned beef on the side of my desk in a rice-cooker. People yelled at first because of the unexpected aroma, but after 4 hours, everyone wanted a piece!
aP: Best vacation you ever took?
CB: I spent two months in Nepal after college. My friend and I walked into Everest Base Camp after the last of the climbing teams went home and we had the whole place to ourselves for two days. Feeling a glacier vibrate under your tent at almost 18,000 feet while watching the avalanche that caused it fall only a few hundred yards away is a pretty amazing experience.
aP: Favorite way to unwind after work?
CB: I love to cook and I love to be outdoors. You’ll probably catch me in front of the stove searing up some pork tenderloin on weeknights. On weekends, same deal except I’ll be trying to reduce my red wine sauce over a campfire in the woods somewhere.
