I took my own number down

There was a number on this homepage. A dollar figure, in large type, in the dark band near the top.

It was real. One clinic, twelve months of records, four gaps, and I could point at the rows that made it up.

Under it was a link that said what the number meant. That link went to a page which said, in full, that the page had not been written yet.

So the number came off.

Not because it was wrong. Because a figure without its method is a claim, and this site has a principle that says identified is not collected. I wrote that principle to describe what a scan does and does not prove. It turns out it also describes what I had done to my own visitors: shown them a total and asked them to take my word for the arithmetic.

Taking someone’s word for the arithmetic is the exact habit I am asking clinic owners to break.

The uncomfortable part is that nobody would have caught it. The number is true. If I had left it up and written the page in a month, no reader would have known the difference. The only thing that failed was the standard, and standards that only bind you when someone is watching are not standards.

What this has to do with your clinic

You have probably seen a number like mine. A recovery figure in a vendor deck. A projected uplift in a proposal. A total on a dashboard nobody can trace back to a list of patients.

The question worth asking is not whether the number is real. It usually is. The question is whether the person showing it can put the working next to it without going away to prepare something first.

If they can, the number is worth having. If they need a week, you are looking at a claim.

What happens next

The figure goes back the day the breakdown is written: what was counted, what was not counted, and where it came from. That page is called How I counted it, because it should invite checking rather than assert rigour.

Until then the section stands on what was always the stronger half. One signal, followed from the moment it was detected through to a verified outcome, with the name of the person who did each step.

A worked example beats a total. I should have trusted that in the first place.