Pat Rioux, RHIT
Health Information Management
Health Information Management
978-779-5511
Professional Life
For most of my professional life I have been involved in healthcare: health insurance claims, medical records, quality assurance/improvement, healthcare consulting, medical coding and billing, and now ELECTRONIC MEDICAL RECORDS, working for eClinicalWorks.com in Westboro, Massachusetts.
I have been most fortunate to have worked as an employee and consultant for Abt Associates in Cambridge and other research companies on wonderfully interesting studies and projects. That work enabled me to meet many interesting people and gain a 'big picture' perspective of health care that would not have otherwise been possible. My earliest mentor, Don Muse, encouraged me to reach higher and learn more and I have always been grateful for his advice. Gary Gaumer, Dave Kidder, Henry Goldberg and others also impressed me with their knowledge and professionalism.
I also had the pleasure of a 'second career' as a real estate investor, a Staff Writer for the International Real Estate Digest (www.ired.com) and was active in the alternative realty brokerage movement of the '90s. Through my second career I learned enough about real estate to feel comfortable completing a 'teardown/rebuild' and can advise friends and families about how to protect themselves in real estate transactions.
Real estate is, unfortunately, a business with a huge lobbying influence in Washington that keeps the consumers' interests second to the trade groups' interests. Even with some reform of recent years, real transparency is still a distant goal.
The ethical practitioners will keep pushing for 'doing the right thing' but there are far too many untrained and unethical persons in the business and little in the way of regulations/enforcement that will fix it. Be very careful and ask tons of questions!
Currently, my focus in health care is on electronic medical records and how to utilize the technological advancements to foster quality improvement for patients and promote better medical record documentation which better serves patients and providers. With ICD-10-CM around the corner, genomic data issues surfacing and privacy being challenged, there is plenty to do and learn. We are living in interesting times.
I have been most fortunate to have worked as an employee and consultant for Abt Associates in Cambridge and other research companies on wonderfully interesting studies and projects. That work enabled me to meet many interesting people and gain a 'big picture' perspective of health care that would not have otherwise been possible. My earliest mentor, Don Muse, encouraged me to reach higher and learn more and I have always been grateful for his advice. Gary Gaumer, Dave Kidder, Henry Goldberg and others also impressed me with their knowledge and professionalism.
I also had the pleasure of a 'second career' as a real estate investor, a Staff Writer for the International Real Estate Digest (www.ired.com) and was active in the alternative realty brokerage movement of the '90s. Through my second career I learned enough about real estate to feel comfortable completing a 'teardown/rebuild' and can advise friends and families about how to protect themselves in real estate transactions.
Real estate is, unfortunately, a business with a huge lobbying influence in Washington that keeps the consumers' interests second to the trade groups' interests. Even with some reform of recent years, real transparency is still a distant goal.
The ethical practitioners will keep pushing for 'doing the right thing' but there are far too many untrained and unethical persons in the business and little in the way of regulations/enforcement that will fix it. Be very careful and ask tons of questions!
Currently, my focus in health care is on electronic medical records and how to utilize the technological advancements to foster quality improvement for patients and promote better medical record documentation which better serves patients and providers. With ICD-10-CM around the corner, genomic data issues surfacing and privacy being challenged, there is plenty to do and learn. We are living in interesting times.
