Blog
Essays by Marina Davar
Notes from both sides of the healthcare workforce equation: building the programs that train clinical staff, and running the Cincinnati medical practice that hires them.
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Prior Authorization Is an Operations Problem
An auth denial reaches the billing queue with a code on it, which is why it gets filed there. The decision that produced it was made three weeks earlier, when somebody booked the slot.
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What DSO Consolidation Did to the Career Ladder
A group practice can publish a tier, fund a credential, and open a door into another location. The one thing it replaced and did not rebuild is the owner who noticed you.
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Teaching Students Who Have Already Failed at School Once
A career-college cohort is largely adults whose last experience of school ended badly. That forecast changes how a marked-up checklist lands, and what the first four weeks are actually doing.
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The Productivity Dip Nobody Budgets For
A system migration is priced as license fees and interface builds. The larger number is the throughput every provider loses for weeks after go-live, and it can be planned.
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Managing the People Who Are Also Your Bosses
In a physician-owned practice the people you manage are the people who employ you. Written decision rights help less than you would hope, and what works instead is slower.
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Accreditation Is Not Paperwork, It Is the Program
Standards read as a compliance exercise produce a compliant program nobody wants to hire from. Read as design constraints at the blank-page stage, they tell you what to build.
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Cross-Training Is Not Coverage, It Is Error Prevention
Most practices cross-train so somebody can fill in during an absence. The larger payoff arrives in the ordinary weeks, as fewer handoff errors and a cleaner claim.
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Competing for Medical Assistants Against a Health System
Four systems in this market can outbid an independent practice and all four are hiring. The wage gap is real, and it explains fewer departures than owners assume.
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What I Say to a Student Before Their First Live Patient
Reassurance is the reflex and it does almost nothing. What actually moves a student from the typodont to a live chair: prediction, one job instead of the whole procedure, and a plan for the moment it goes sideways.
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Scope of Practice Stops at the River
Expanded functions and supervision rules are set state by state, so a dental program in a bi-state metro trains every cohort for two legal realities at once.
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Third-Next-Available Is the Only Access Metric I Trust
A full schedule and a long wait are different problems with opposite fixes. What the metric exposes that room utilization and visit counts hide.
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Externship Sites Tell You the Truth About Your Curriculum
Preceptors report what a graduate cannot do long before surveys or placement data will. How to ask the questions that produce a finding, and where that finding should land.
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Credentialing Is a Revenue Problem Wearing an HR Costume
A provider who cannot bill is a fixed cost with no offset. Why enrollment status belongs on the revenue dashboard next to days in A/R, not in a personnel folder.
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The Student Who Failed the Same Skill Check Three Times
A repeated competency failure is a diagnostic problem, not a disciplinary one. What the fourth attempt should look like, and where the line actually sits.
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I Trained the People I Now Hire
What practices actually need on day one versus what programs graduate, and what you see when you have sat on both sides of the hiring desk.
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Building a Dental Assisting Program From Zero
Curriculum designed backward from employer need, the accreditation grind, a clinic built on a career-college budget, and what I would sequence differently.
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Denials Are a Management Problem, Not a Billing Problem
Most denials are born at the front desk, long before a claim is submitted. A practical, root-cause framework for practice leaders.