Advanced Medical Reviews Reviews

- Strong absence of communication - Little to no presence of management - Lack of coordination between staff members - Little to no organization/resources for information - Inexperienced staff (occasionally bordering incompetent, but to be fair you'll generally find this no matter where you work, even more so when considering the level of compensation/lack of training) - Overstaffing due to high turn-over rate (Estimated at 100% every 2 years within the Operations department) - Unrealistic promotion compensation - Overly transparent monetary concerns (i.e., greed) When starting a position with AMR, training is provided via one of your peers. The peer also has the responsibility of maintaining their own quota/goals, so the training seems very sparse. This does not reflect on the quality of guidance received however, as the assigned peer is very knowledgeable and helpful when available. The majority of the training is done from an outdated guide, and you will learn through trial and error (the peer will regularly evaluate your training cases, providing helpful feedback.) You are also assigned a peer buddy, to ask any questions that arise through training (which you will/should have.) Unfortunately my experience with my buddy was very limited, and not quite the resource it was made out to be (maybe don't have Team Leads as buddies, as they are constantly juggling their own responsibilities and cannot provide the attention a new-hire would need.) Your job will mainly focus on formatting cases (reviews) received from a variety of clients, and pulling information from the documents received. After the review has been formatted, you will assign it to a reviewer in the appropriate field, and follow-up with the case until a physician has accepted and completed their rationale. AMR is very lenient when increasing your productivity goals, so if you can type 40 wpm and have any sort of prior experience performing data entry, you'll have no trouble formatting cases. However assigning reviewers can be a difficult task, as they are contract employees. Although AMR houses data specific to each reviewer, it is very unorganized, which can make it difficult to assign the appropriate physician to a case. It may also be impossible to complete a case for a client, due to the difficulty of the specialty required / turn-around time. Your productivity goal does not take this into consideration on any level, and as the cases are picked up individually by due date / work-flow, there is a constant amount of cherry picking going on. You will also be assigned to a team. Your Team Leader will effectively act as your manager, monitoring your work-flow, providing information/ new practices through team meetings, etc. I was very fortunate in the Team Lead assigned to me, and was able to make the most out of the situation. However others are not as fortunate, and struggle to get by with their Team Leaders. The teams have no specific structure (literally), and the peers within them do not generally work together more so than any other peer within the Ops department. Aside from my Team Lead, I had virtually no contact or discussions with management on any level (aside from a weekly meeting.) When your productivity meets the required quota, you will begin training for an additional position within AMR ('Quality assurance' of physician rationale.) When I first heard this position was mandatory without an increase in wage, I was a little flabbergasted, as it is levels above the previous job's required ability. I personally do not believe this job should be performed by non-medically trained staff, as it requires knowledge of medical terminology and an alarming amount of cases do not get checked by a medically trained professional after adjustment (outside of the physician assigned to the case, who does not get compensated for re-reviewing any edits made.) This made me very uncomfortable, and ultimately encouraged me to move on from Advanced Medical Reviews.

Quite a few cons, hence the 2 stars. I probably would’ve rated AMR as 3.5 stars a few months ago. But the merger lost AMR a star because my #1 con is the sale of AMR to EW. Here is why: AMR is in a unique state of flux as any company is when a Fortune 500 company acquires them. First, I was not impressed by the EW execs when they visited. They dodged all questions with the typical political ruse of misdirection. According to Yahoo! Finance, both made close to $1mil/year, and they acted like it. Second, I feel like the founders of AMR are taking the take the money and run approach. But according to our CEO, they’ve “earned it”. Third, EW has absolutely awful benefits - just look at their Glassdoor page, it is their #1 complaint - no 401K matching, unable to opt out of vision coverage, poor healthcare options, etc. - typical Fortune 500 ploys to improve the bottom line. AMR used to have great benefits (floating holiday, 3% 401k matching, etc). When I first started at AMR, I felt the small business family feeling. It is gone now. My #2 con overall is that the management does not let staff work remote anymore. I work in the office and I don’t understand why were not allowed to work remote. Traffic is awful, especially around the office. Commuting is one of the worst parts of this job. And you’re not allowed to work shifts other than 8-5 or 9-6 because of “company needs”. In my opinion, every company has needs, some just care more about offering flexible shifts than others (AMR used to be one of them). There are some people who are allowed to work remote, but no one seems to know why. AMR has all the capabilities to let employees to work from home (and you think it would save them money to do so), but management claims they are harder to account for and training them is harder and there are more costs with remote people? I do not agree because AMR has pretty good productivity measures in place so it baffles me that it is that hard to keep track of remote people - if they aren't working, fire them. My #3 overall con: literally ZERO incentives. It is like no one has ever heard of the word incentive. I guess management says they are not in the budget. Yearly bonus? Its completely dependent on the competence of your coworkers. My #4 overall con: management really has no idea what they are doing. Many of the Team Leads (the supervisor to this position) quit recently under unknown circumstances. Instead of being experts for our questions and helping us process cases when volume is high, they just kind of micromanage and audit us to make sure were not loosing the company too much money. Above them are the department directors who are particularly awful at explaining anything and good luck if you can even get any management figure in a meeting. Which brings me to my #5 overall con: no room for growth. After you are out of training, the only thing you can be promoted to is Team Lead, Sales, or rarely a tech spot will open up. I have heard no one wants to be a Team Lead because the department directors are slave drivers and you really don’t get to do anything other than middle management work. Sales is not a promotion because they make the same as we do (maybe $3000 more a year because of commission) and you know… its sales… Most people just end up finding other jobs. Management says the lack of vertical growth is not a problem because in exchange they give us a lot of opportunities to develop skills that are transferrable. My #6 con: the only thing that matters to management is the bottom line. Did you meet your prod for today? Well that sucks because if you didn’t you will hear about it. All we’ve been hearing lately is profitability and about how EW needs us to double it (see literally ANY article about corporate greed). My #7 con, we have to complain (a lot) to get anything. Remember those portal upgrades? Remember when we had to take significant time out of our day to document every single slowdown? Remember how there were a lot of people telling you it was happening months before? I do. Remember when we were told they were going to build the break room at night but no one bothered to get an actual quote to realize that its wayyyyy more expensive to employ night construction crews? My #8 con (and honestly, this should be higher on the list): the pay is absurdly low for the intensity and complexity of the work. Usually they start you at $16/hour and after you are out of training (90-180 days) they’ll bump up your pay by $1 or so. I’ve asked the most senior MRCs and they only make $19/hour. Management says pay is comparable to similar jobs in the area but 1) we are a niche market (independent medical reviews) so comparable jobs are hard to compare to (you cant exactly just search “medical reviewer coordinator” and get a ton of results) and 2) the entry level healthcare jobs in the area that I’ve searched for actually pay $1-2 more per hour. Again, see the earlier part about high turnover rate.