health advocates and navigators

Non-Payer? Or Scammer? A New Step for Client Acquisition

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We hear about scams and frauds every day in the news. An elderly person is convinced to donate money to a scam charity, or doctors defraud Medicare, or someone’s identity is stolen, or the IRS’s website is hacked…. Thing is – like car accidents – we never think a scam can happen to us. So we simply, and naively, go about our days and our business thinking we are somehow immune. We are such nice people, so very giving, and can’t imagine anyone would ever try to take advantage of us…Right? No. Wrong. Wrong, and expensive. One of our APHA …

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Twisted Words Put Me Off

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Recently, I had one phone conversation and one email, with two different people who are hoping to, and working to become advocates, both exchanges which resulted in very negative takeaways on my part. And then I wondered – how many of us leave the same impression, even if we never intend to come across the way we do? And if we do so, no matter how unintentionally, does it give patient advocacy a bad name, or a black eye? Those twisted words are actually responses most of us run into every day. All that is required to fix them is …

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Misleading Headline Provides an Opportunity

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This week the Chicago Tribune featured patient advocacy as a growing trend – a marvelous exposure to private advocacy for the uninitiated (uninitiated = most of the known universe). Several of our APHA members were mentioned in the article and for the most part, it was an excellent representation of the status of private advocacy. Except for the headline: Now, most of us are intelligent enough to know that headlines are created to suck in readers, and too often, intentionally focus on some point that doesn’t really represent the story – just draws those readers. And so it was with …

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Enemies? No, But With an Important Distinction

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A recent email exchange with an APHA member highlighted a point we don’t make often enough, and one you need to embrace so you can discuss it with potential clients. The problem is – she used it to leap to an errant conclusion, one that demands clarity. In her email, she mentioned that she was considering joining a different professional organization, one that focuses on hospital advocacy, teaching hospital advocates how to do their jobs. She stated that the other organization “has multiple affiliations with those purported enemies of true patient advocacy, patient relations departments.” What? I was so taken …

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Do Advocates Have a Duty to Report Dangerous Patients?

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Warning! This will be one of those posts you think back to from time to time, because the answers aren’t clear or easy, and the stakes are so high. A few weeks ago we all watched the news about 150 people who lost their lives as their plane crashed into the French Alps; a tragic loss of life which we learned later was caused by the co-pilot, who had intentionally crashed the plane – suicide by one – mass murder of 149 others. Horrible, tragic, and just so very, very sad. It’s easy, of course, to dismiss the young pilot …

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It’s a Thing!

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One of my favorite activities as the director of the Alliance of Professional Health Advocates is conducting the APHA workshops in business and marketing that we offer a few times each year. One reason I enjoy them so much is because I meet our APHA members – passionate people who plan to improve their business and marketing knowledge in order to strengthen their practices. It is TRULY and ALWAYS a pleasure – and fun. My absolute favorite workshops are those where I learn as much from attendees as I teach to them. And so it was recently in Phoenix, Arizona …

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Helping Your Clients Deduct Your Services From Their Income Taxes (IRS and CRA)

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(Reviewed and Updated February 2022) It’s a good year to revisit patient advocacy services and income taxes. Our first review came in 2010. We looked again in 2013. While little (maybe nothing) has changed, this year I have a new suggestion for you – a bit of a twist. In question is whether or not your patient advocacy services should be included in the list of medical expenses that allow them to be deducted from your clients’ income taxes; whether they can be used to reach that 10% or 7.5% threshold that allows them to be deductible (for the IRS). …

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