nurse practitioner

registered nurse

software engineer

medical assistant

physical therapist

LHC Group

My experience in the Heartlite agency was bitter sweet. I found a deep-rooted love for hospice care, individualized patient-centered care planning, and providing direct patient and caregiver education. However, due to ineffective management and decline in the quality of services we were providing in light of increasing the bottom line, I grew increasingly discouraged and found it difficult to promote the company in the community. Though I wore many hats and fulfilled many roles within this company, there was never any positive reinforcement or even proper training for each role I took on. I did grow substantially as a nurse, a manager, and a Christian only because I went against the grain and spoke out against the many things I felt were wrong within the agency. I felt compelled to fight for the patients' rights and take a stand against my direct supervisor as well as middle management for their immoral and unethical behavior and the degradation they were promoting in the company. Through the fight up the chain of command, I learned that I am much stronger than I realized, especially when I know I am driven by a righteous cause. I love admitting patients to hospice and promoting the true purpose behind hospice services. I found that with very gentle compassion and demonstrating a calm understanding as I explained the overwhelming concept of end-of-life care, the patients and caregivers were able to more easily process and accept the hospice philosophy and concept of palliative care. As the quality of care began to deteriorate, I fought to step in when my manager chose to turn the other cheek. I called meetings where I pinpointed specific problems with patient care and wrote emails and staff updates weekly for months to try to shape and improve the quality of care provided by the company as a whole. Most of my coworkers agreed and implemented the new suggestions. Those who did not wish to comply, including management staff, were not reprimanded or encouraged in any way to improve by anyone above me. I had been told by my immediate supervisor as well as her supervisor, our regional executive director, that my position in the company would be listed as assistant manager so that I could stand in when my manager was frequently absent from the office. Without any support from the supervisory positions, those staff who chose to give lack-luster job performances continued to deteriorate. Once other staff saw that everyone was not being held to the same standards of care, many of them became less concerned with their own performance as well. Eventually, communication was non-existent and the quality of care continued to decline. Since I had already spoken out about these concerns as well as my distress over my manager violation of HIPPA almost daily by discussing patient specific information in the office while on the phone with her family or others not employed by Heartlite, I chose to reach as high as possible and emailed the corporate president in Illinois to report my concerns in depth. There was no response, therefore, after a 2 week wait, I sent a second email informing the president of the company that I would be leaving the company as I could not continue to work under such disgraceful conditions since he seemed to condone the immoral behavior as well. He contacted me immediately by email asking to speak by phone. I agreed, and he eventually called two days later after I had already elected to turn in my resignation to my manager. He informed me at that time that they would be performing an internal investigation to look further into my concerns. They did not use a corporate level individual to complete this investigation. In fact, they used another manager at a second office in this region who has worked under the executive direct who also seemed to condone the behavior I had reported. I discussed my concerns about the person they had selected to complete the investigation, but my concerns were disregarded. I was told by the leader of the investigation on my last day at Heartlite that the investigation had been completed and the necessary actions had already been taken, although no details were given. I continue to pray that my stand has at least been the first stone thrown in the pond so that the ripple effect will eventually promote the changes necessary for improving patient care for the benefit of the patients first and foremost, but also for the well-intentioned employees who remain in the company.

Here is an honest review of the RN Field Assessor position with Optum: 
Assessors start out as contractors, with no paid holidays and no paid time off. A typical day for an assessor starts out with 0730 Huddle (0700 on Wednesday mornings). Huddles usually last about 20-30 minutes on all weekdays except for Wednesdays. Wednesdays are 'training days' and Huddles usually last 45 minutes to 1 hour. After the Huddle ends, we are expected to do 3 functional assessments per day. In the beginning it sounds like a nurse's dream job - no direct patient care, no on-call hours, no evenings, no weekends, no holidays. Assessments average 2 hours to complete, and this is for the "IDEAL ASSESSMENT", in which a client is not hard of hearing and provides only the answer to the specific question that you asked for the 250+ questions on this assessment. In reality, you will have to repeat questions for the hard of hearing and will have difficulty keeping an assessment on track, as the older generation (and also the younger generation), likes to talk and visit. If you are conscientious and prefer to look over your work before submitting the assessment to the Office of Long Term Care (i.e., you prefer to turn in quality work in order for Medicaid beneficiaries to not lose their services), you can easily spend an additional 20-30 minutes per assessment, looking it over for misspelled words, making sure you selected the correct drop-down boxes, etc, and you most likely will always find mistakes because you rush through each assessment in order to get to the next assessment. So now you are up to 8 hours, and that does not include drive time or the time spent calling and confirming the next day's appointments. Drive times average 1.5 hours per day. If you have a cancellation you are expected to reach out to clients who are scheduled several days to several weeks out and ask them if would be able to drop whatever they're currently doing and do their assessment RIGHT NOW. Very, very often, you will call 5 to 7 people and will spend approximately 30-45 minutes in order to find a client who is willing to drop everything and let you do their assessment on such short notice. By this time, you're running about 45 minutes behind schedule and you WILL BE  starting your next assessment later than scheduled. Yet...If you dare to show more than 8 hours for more than just a few days, you get "counseled" about "time management". If you have an appeal, and you are guaranteed to have several appeals, (client appeals the Office of Long Term Care's decision and the appeal goes to a judge), you are required to block out 2 hours per appeal, in addition to the 3 daily assessments. At this point, are you seeing the reason for overworked, burned-out nurses who are leaving this job left and right? There is a weekly incentive for completing 15 assessments per week, but it is not paid out on the paycheck in which is was earned. It has to be approved before being paid, and the person in charge of approving incentives only does these approvals twice per month, as I was told when I inquired why I had not received incentive pay 3 weeks after earning it. This renders the "incentive" not much of an incentive when you have to wait so long to be paid. When this company realizes that there are those assessors who want the incentive and are willing to bust their tails to do whatever it takes to earn the weekly incentive, and there are those who are NOT interested in the incentives and can comfortably do 2 accurate, quality assessments per day, and when they stop forcing 3 assessments per day down every assessor's throat, they will stop losing assessors left and right. We have literally gone through about 20 assessors in the 10 months that I have been employed with Optum. They also promise you will be converted from contract to full-time status "shortly after" being hired, but they fail to mention that this only happens about once per year, and they are super-secretive about when and who gets hired. They know that if those who were not transitioned to full-time were to find out, they would have a massive amount of people either quitting immediately or giving notice. It is extremely discouraging to work without paid holidays or paid time off for this long. Nurses simply get burned out and quit. And did I mention the bed bugs, roaches, mice, filthy living conditions, growling dogs and smokers that you will encounter weekly, if not on a daily, basis?

Training: was not thorough and had minimal hands on training on working the systems the company uses. ENDLESS SLIDES. Empty promises to get permission for the class to get hands on training. We received hands on training TWICE throughout the whole process and that was after training (work) hours. People have lives, they didn’t care. When the class tried to bring this up with the higher ups they basically said “It is what it is” and moved on with the meeting. They did not care about our input about OUR training. 

Work: The job itself was quite simple but also very tedious. Once you press ready on the phones it’s non stop calling from there. You can go from just filling simple orders and having lovely conversation with the member to a person yelling at you about why their medication isn’t covered if it was covered last year. High stress environment, typical call center. They were very nitpicky about the surveys customers did at the end of the call. One of the survey questions was “Would you recommend Optum to your friends or family?” It doesn’t matter if the person made a comment stating how wonderful you were and gave you a 10 on everything else. If they stated no on that ONE question you’d get your butt handed to you. 
The systems were always freezing and closing out. Which was very frustrating whenever you had that happen DURING a call. It happened frequently, multiple times a day. You’d lose all your members information and then have to re-ask for their information. They also didn’t want you to let the members know that your system crashed you’d have to tell them your system is “updating”. 

Coworkers/Managers: So you’re broken down into little teams with separate managers. I’ve been lucky enough to have very understanding and chill managers. I’ve heard from coworkers that were in my training group that their managers were basically breathing down their necks.. so it’s basically the luck of the draw with that one. 
Employees from different departments can be down right rude when you transfer to them. ESPECIALLY the employees that handle the employee assistant line. I usually tried to avoid that line when I first started off because I figured out real quick that even though their job is to assist you when you are either stuck, not quite sure what to do in a scenario or your system is down that they do not want to do their job. Most will give attitude and make snide remarks. 
Offshore employees never got disciplined for cold transferring and always got away with it. Most of them don’t do their jobs properly and only have access to one of our systems (we work out of two). Very inconsistent and poor training as well on their end. You’ll be getting PLENTY of cold transfers from them while the member on the other line is confused as to why they are speaking to another person & then upset that they have to explain their whole situation again.  

Pay: yes, it’s higher than minimum wage but no it’s not worth everything you have to put up with in my eyes. 

Overtime: When I first started working there were plenty of overtime opportunities which I loved. The process for getting overtime was really simple as well. They’d post all the days and hours overtime was available and all you had to do was log in and select how many hours you of overtime you wanted to work. The slots did fill out fast though so once you got an email stating overtime hours had been posted you better select your hours IMMEDIATELY! 

Advancement: To be honest this really seems like a dead end job. They didn’t have a system in place that allowed you to venture into other fields or further your knowledge to advance into a higher position. 

The company I worked for prior to its purchase by DMG was busy yet tight-knit. I had the pleasure of working for some great people, and I really felt like a team. However, for all of DMG's emphasis on team and 'teammates' and 'all for one, one for all' things fell very flat very quickly.

Management was okay for the most part, except for some low to mid-level types who liked to stir the pot and create internal power struggles; politics made it difficult to determine direction and provide service to our market. Lack of IT staff or knowledge meant a small team had to figure out how to 'wing it'; great opportunities to learn, but everyone found themselves slipping through the cracks or repurposed to fit other needs. For a while I had a great boss and management structure who really fought for us; these things went away after DMG's sale to Optum about a year ago.

Responsibilities went very well beyond the role, training was almost nonexistent(except for some higher-level coworkers being a great source of information and empowerment to us 'boots on the ground', and pay was subpar at best. Raises were almost unheard of and competing positions offered far better pay. On call rotations were very frequent(up to every other week) and you could expect to receive calls any time. The work/life balance was not great, and there was an overall feeling that if you weren't available via email 24/7 you weren't trying hard enough. Advancing to more technical roles and/or management positions was nonexistent; outside hires were far more common than internal promotions. Interest in volunteering for more technical disciplines was welcomed locally but very much frowned upon at the corporate level. This is with a generally stellar reputation with the company and excellent performance reviews as well as manager recommendations to take on higher-level work.

The positives were the ability to learn quickly if you fell in with the right team, though overcoming the corporate 'hurdle' was very difficult. The camaraderie with the local desktop. help desk, network and sysads was the best part of the job, followed by providing help and support to a group of dedicated clinicians. Unfortunately the buyouts and restructuring have been as hard on the clinicians as it has been on the support staff; attitudes are for the most part stressful and fearful.

Current(as of 2018) local IT management is churlish, critical, and unpleasant; expect to be held to rigid, inflexible standards and deal with processes that are inefficient at best. The environment I left makes it very difficult to tread water, let alone succeed. If you take pride in your work and value being valued for your efforts, this is not a good environment for you. My new employer has offered a far less stressful environment while valuing my efforts and productivity. Knowing there are better employers out there makes it difficult at best to recommend DMG, at least for IT staff.

I'm a current employee, but submitting my resignation next week.  Optumrx game me a great opportunity 18 months ago, however I am ecstatic to be leaving.

My review is for Optumrx,  not UHC, and will be completely honest. 

My biggest complaints are the lack of opportunities for advancement, and poor leadership.  Don't get me wrong, there are tons of opportunities to learn and grow your skills - resume builders if you will.  However, none of these correlate to increases in pay or responsibility.  If you are looking for a long term position, or a stepping stone, then Optumrx is right for you.  If you are looking to begin with a new company and move up by way of performance,  look elsewhere. I can personally attest to this as fact.  Optumrx sources their leadership (supervisors, managers) from outside agencies.  Internal promotion does not exist.  I've seen seven supervisors hired in the past 18 months, only one of them was a csa who happened to be on site since it opened 2 years ago.  I can only remember seeing one job posting for a supervisor position, ever.  Just the other week at a party, I met someone who asked me about working at optumrx, then she said, "I hear there are some supervisor positions opening up there soon."  Wow, news to me.  Let's just say I haven't seen any.  Just proves my point.

Since my hire I've earned my bachelor's degree, achieved two pay raises, made 5 straight quarterly bonuses, and ranked inside of the top 10 advocates in a given month on many occasions.  All of this and I'm still on the bottom of the proverbial totem pole, and new hires are actually making $0.65 per hour more than me.  Starting to get the picture?  

I have literally applied to 100 positions within UHC through their internal network.   I aggressively pursued most of them by directly contacting the hiring managers for the roles.  I received a grand total of two brush off interviews.  Really discouraging. 

High attrition rate.  My training class began with 30 advocates,  only 4 remain once I'm gone.  Also, the computer systems they use are 10 years old and have 100s of problems with no solutions except, "work through" which means turn off and turn on.

Job is not hard, and not stimulating either.  Everything a csa does can be done online through the website, or through the company's automated phone system.  The only reason members call us is because they want to speak to a person, or don't own a computer.

Pay is average at best. Paid time off is reasonably generous, about 4.5 hours per pay period.  Company offers voluntary time off, which is unpaid and doesn't count against you. Insurance benefits are bad.   Only available plans are high deductible plans, exclusive networks and limited coverage - ala working poor.  The only benefits worth it are the 401k match ($1 for $1 up to 4.5%) and the UHC stock purchase (15% discount)

Basically, all of this adds up to a below average job, with basic work, decent benefits, and no opportunity.  But it sure does look good on a resume.  Company has lost sight of its true purpose of service, and turned its focus to growth that is borderline repulsive. Maybe you will see for yourself.

As a remote coder contractor, meeting CPH-charts per hr-highly depends on the chart mix assigned as well as how dense in encounters and codes the charts are.It will absolutely work against you when you have charts that are large 500 pgs, 1000 pgs, 3000 pgs, etc.They expect the charts to be completed within 48 hrs from when they were assigned.
If there are priority projects you are most likely not going to meet CPH because you are forced to complete whatever needs to be done.And yes, it is your fault that CPH was not met and your score will suffer.
Add to that incompetent supervisors that have not coded a chart in their life who do not understand what you are dealing with even after you explain with facts and numbers why certain charts are time consuming.As a matter of fact, they will say something in the lines of "I understand..., however..." and do the exact opposite of what you might need help with ..they have the upper hand , you are playing the losing game. Welcome to the "short end of the stick club"!They justify this with "it's a production environment".Yes, it's obviously understandable, but being reasonable given specific circumstances( chart dense in encounters, complicated medical history requiring multiple codes) a little more flexibily and understanding would be appreciated.
It happened quite often that charts were not loaded or removed from queue in order to complete a priority chart or project.The result? CPH plummeted and basically in their eyes you are underperforming and are not up to standards, hence, your job is on the line.Nobody cares that there was no inventory or that the priority project was mandated !It is ALWAYS the coder's fault!!!!
Every week your coder scorecard will display your 
 year/month/week to date CPH score with absolutely no mention of situations like:no inventory, priority projects, computer system/program issues.All these negatively impact your CPH.
You are a disposable asset and basically you're working one week to another.
Depending on the project you are working on, CPH varies.However, it is challenging to meet the numbers and expect to be clicking away all day ( you'll do great if you can type with your eyes closed...but how are you going to speed read through the notes than? ;)...if you catch my drift...)
 Volume matters more then quality.It is highly questionable the quality of coding given the CPH standards set.
Training overall is great and the tools provided are very helpful.
You are expected to follow a schedule in CST.As a contractor there are no paid holidays so you will have the option of working four 10 hr shifts or four 8 hr shifts if there is an observed holiday during the work week.
Health insurance is considerably high as a contractor, when you are paid weekly.
If they are happy with your performance, you will be on a temporary layoff ( furlough) for 2-3 months( or more , depending on the business needs starting sometime in January) and called to return.Meanwhile, you are eligible for unemployment.



First off, I am a traveler, so I cannot really speak to the benefits as far as a full-time staff member would go. However, I have been at this company for a while, so I have a lot to say.
The biggest issue with this company is that it’s a corporate company. Their productivity model is horrible. They want you to do 25 points per week which is normal nationwide. However, one routine visit is only 0.75 so basically you have to see seven patients a day in order to meet productivity. That is virtually unheard of with any other company. Routine visits are almost always one point  but not with this company.  We are driving 60 to 80 miles a day that’s a little hard to do. They give you no time outside of a patient’s home for a case management activities.  
There are also many patients who shouldn’t even be on home health because they don’t have a skill need but we are made to keep open because if we discharge a patient and we don’t have enough admissions coming in, they get upset. 
There is no real nursing training that happens. Most of the people I work with don’t even know what kind of wound care We should be doing to help heal a wound. We get education on how to stage pressure ulcer but no education on appropriate wound care. Many of the patients don’t go to wound clinics so it’s up to us to decide what would be best and ask the doctors for an order. This is the first place I’ve ever worked. It doesn’t have training regarding this.
There is no case management training. We are told that we are case managers but yet there’s no training involved in this, so most of the nurses don’t know what this exactly means. They are just basically doing visits and as long as there’s a warm body to cover visits everything is fine within the company.
Many of the nurses and therapist I work with are working 10 to 12 hour days but because it’s the pay visit model they don’t even get paid for half of it. I worked many other companies, and this one is probably the worst I’ve worked at they don’t appear to care much about the patient. It’s all about the scores and money. We also have some crazy model that we have to follow in order to schedule our visits, which is basically usually about once a week nursing visits. Therefore the hospital  admissions are insane because we are not seeing patients frequently enough in order to help them say out of  the hospital, which is what home health is supposed to be designed for. 
On-call visits with any other company are for emergencies only but not with LHC if somebody wants their blood pressure checked if 7 o’clock at night you have to go out and see them and you might be gone for two or three hours depending on where they are located. There is absolutely no work balance.
The only good thing that I can say honestly, is it some of the people I work with are amazing other than that I would never work as a full-time employee at this company.


I worked Medicare Insurance Sales for a specific insurance company.  They provided all of the training required including a 10 week (paid) College of Insurance class to obtain your Health and Sickness insurance license and then a 5-8 week paid training class for the specific plans and systems.  These aren't very difficult as long as you pay attention.  After the first year I worked there, every training class for each following year was a breeze.  I could ace all of the exams and tests and questions without needing to go through the work, so it would end up being paid time to sit and look at a computer, which most of us do all day anyway.  I worked there off and on for 8 or 9 years as the job was mainly seasonal since Medicare Open Enrollment is from Oct 15-Dec 7.  If your numbers are good you are usually asked to stay on in an alternate role until ramp up for the next Enrollment season the following year.  There were opportunities for advancement as the turnover rate was so high, they'd grab hold of anyone that liked the job and move them to trainer, manager, and further up the ladder.  Within 6 years of working there a fellow employee went from Sales to Training to Managing to eventually Operations Manager.  The path is there for your taking.   The job involved inbound calls to sell Medicare plans.  Most people you talk to were very nice, seeing as how you were their source of information and you could explain Medicare and all of the confusing parts of it. 
During the Enrollment period the call volume was extremely high and you were expected to complete all tasks including notating and preparing the account for the next representative before the next call came in, which was as quickly as 5 seconds.  This often led to getting backed up with accounts that needed closing out.  This WILL take a toll on you and you WILL feel worn out at the end of your shift.  But the bright side is the days go by in an instant because you're always focused on calls.  The pay was generous and Performance bonuses were available for everyone as long as they hit Key Performance Indicators which could sometimes be difficult, but if you are punctual and don't miss excessive time, you can usually hit the numbers.  There were two 15 minute breaks and a 30 minute lunch, which was a bummer.  Paid Holiday time after 90 days I believe and PTO that builds per pay week. Basic benefits including basic vision and dental after 90 days. The people I met there were great.  Very few people you didn't want to meet other than a few stern and stubborn management figures.  

Too good to be true when interviewing with recruiters. Job description sounded perfect for someone that wanted to work from home 100%, with decent starting pay and full benefits including retirement. That’s where they get you. They tell you everything you’d want to hear in order to land the position quickly. Mandatory “training” is 100% remote but on camera with live video & chat. The instructors are too worried about how many restroom breaks “students” take, without regard to medical illnesses (baffling considering this is a medical company!) instead of actually teaching the class and were often sidetracked with every interruption. With large classes of 25+ individuals it’s difficult to really grasp what we need to know to be successful on the job. People were always falling behind, others would interrupt constantly to flaunt their skills if they had already work in this type of industry before and make negative comments about those that were brand new to the CSR department instead of offering advice to help. If you needed time off, getting approval from management or even response to acknowledge the request was nonexistent. They do provide all equipment you need for the job which was fantastic. 
They throw you on the phones the second week of training with irate customers without even having access to some of the software to navigate the calls successfully. Extremely stressful for everyone, even the seasoned CSR reps displayed their dissatisfaction with the lack of training to prepare. back to back calls constantly throughout your day, little down time, If any time properly document your calls/day. If their training program was developed to actually teach material step by step and give hands on examples prior to throwing you into it so early on would be much more beneficial and more
People would probably stay with the company instead. Extremely high rate of turnover, which now I understand why. 
Shifts are based on bids, you are not guaranteed your same supervisor or shift for a long period of time. Not consistent. Waiting period on all benefits and retirement - unlike what they tell you in the interviews (said immediately). Pay is ok to start but hard to earn raises. You do not get your sign on bonus until you’ve worked there a few months - year. Almost impossible to  transfer to a new department if there is an opening that you are interested in. Hired with intention of handling pharmacy prescription calls/refills etc. ended up being totally false job description posted and was a job to upsell insurance benefits and educate customers on insurance plans instead. 

I worked for this company back in 2010 and it was called Connextions back then. I really enjoyed working for this company. The hours were perfect for me, the pay was good, and the people were easy to get along with and very friendly. We had potlucks very often, parties on birthdays, and regular meetings where we would recognize one another for doing a good job.

On the flipside of that coin, you must absolutely be on alert and adhere STRICTLY to the rules and policies (like a robot and not a human who makes mistakes). The security guards which were hired to work there were young and hungry. I worked the night shift in my department from 4p to 1am by myself and one of the new guards would consistently bother me and "accidentally" turn off the lights in my department during his rounds. He attempted to hit on me several times and when I alerted him to my relationship preferences for females instead of males, he became upset. 

Not long after that, this security guard sabotaged me and I was fired for a packet of printer paper. No warning, no nothing. It was my first offense but they are very strict on taking things home from work whether it's a paperclip or a pack of paper. What hurt is that he saw me take the paper that night, spoke to me and another guard even walked me to my car as usual to ensure my safety, and neither of them said anything. However, the day I was being fired, he lied saying he thought I was a work-at-home agent and needed the paper for that reason when he saw me there at the building every day for 7-months from 4p until 1am and he tried to hit on me to no avail. 

I've learned not to take anything home from work unless I have express written permission from a manager but also to steer clear of becoming too close with anyone at the workplace as they may end up sabotaging you later on. I admit I was wrong for taking the paper. I returned it the day after I was fired to prove that it wasn't worth my job and had I known it would have gotten me fired I wouldn't have taken it. It was a misunderstanding because I am, literally, the ONLY one working on my team at that time of night so there was no one to ask about it. We get paper by the box (10 or more per box) and, at the time, I didn't think it would be considered stealing. However, I understand business needs and how they view things so I can understand how it is classified as stealing and grounds for termination. But, I think that termination should be at the discretion of management. I still believe I should have been given a verbal or written warning for it and was able to keep my job since I was one of the best agents on my team according to my scores, call times, and patient recommendations. In any case, that is the consequence of stealing from work and I've learned that.

Top Job Titles	Average Salary
Nurse practitioner 14 salaries reported	$120,913 per year
Registered nurse 222 salaries reported	$40.71 per hour
Software engineer 54 salaries reported	$107,579 per year
Medical assistant 75 salaries reported	$22.19 per hour
Physical therapist 260 salaries reported	$49.03 per hour

Working at Optum: Company Overview and Reviews

Optum

Optum Ratings

Popular jobs at Optum

Salary Satisfaction

Job Seeker Tools

Employer Tools

Browse

Stay Connected