If a vendor needs a week, you are looking at a claim

A recovery figure in a vendor’s deck. A total on a dashboard nobody can trace back to a list of patients. The question is not whether the number is true. It is whether the vendor can pull up the rows that make up that total, before the meeting ends, 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.

I failed my own test. This homepage carried $127,000 in large type. The figure was identified, not collected: money the records showed was slipping in one clinic over twelve months, across four gaps, and I could point to the rows behind each one.

Under it sat a link that read “How I counted this”. It went to a page saying the breakdown had not been written yet.

So the number came off. Not because it was wrong, but because a total whose working nobody can see is a claim, whoever is showing it. That is the habit I am asking clinic owners to break, and I had built it into my own homepage. Standards that only bind you when someone is watching are not standards.

Five days later the breakdown was written. How I count carries the four gaps, their amounts, and the cohort they came from, and the $127,000 is back on the page with that link under it. It is still an identified figure, not collected money.

What I would do in your clinic: the next time anyone shows you a recovery total, me included, ask to see the rows that add up to it before the meeting ends. Not a sample, the list. What you learn from the answer is worth more than the number was.