Small-Town Living, Rustic Roots: Meet Tyrene Cook – Part 5

Working at the Vail Valley Surgery Center challenged me in many wonderful ways and pushed me to grow both professionally and personally. During my time there, I learned what it truly meant to be a steward of a for-profit business—looking closely at systems, thinking outside the box, and finding ways to improve processes that could save the company thousands and thousands of dollars. One of the greatest challenges came when the administrator tasked me with bringing the surgery center’s billing process in-house, a change that would save the company over a million dollars in outside billing costs.

While I had done medical billing before, I had always stepped into systems that were already designed and running. At the surgery center, I was responsible for building the entire system from the ground up—single-handedly. This meant creating the billing structure, building forms, learning the complexities of ambulatory surgery center billing (which was a beast compared to anything I had previously worked with), setting up electronic billing providers, obtaining insurance IDs, and becoming fully credentialed for electronic billing. The process required many hours of research, learning, and problem-solving. When something didn’t work, I had to humbly recognize the issue, adjust the process, and make it better. Within just a few months, the surgery center was successfully billing entirely from within its own four walls—a system that I had built and implemented from the ground up.