Pros
Work from home. Non Toxic team.
Cons
Low pay, like $40 an hour. Absolutely no room for promotion. You likely have to wait 5-8 years before a management position opens up. Until then you're stuck around $40 an hour even though the application says pay is up to $52. Here's a secret, NOBODY gets paid $52 an hour, not even the nurses who've been there for 10-20 years. Non stop back to back calls. It's a different kind of stress. No autonomy in how you practice. You basically read from a script to get a series of yes or no answers. You cannot deviate from the script or you fail. Every action is measured, recorded, and reviewed for performance, including your bathroom breaks down to the minute and second. You're not allowed to document for too long after your call, even if the call took 45 minutes long. Raises (merit increase) are pathetic. 2024-2025 most RNs got less than a 50 cent per hour pay raise. When patients refuse your advise to call 911, you must try to convince them otherwise, then offer to call 911 for them, and then offer to connect them to their PCP or on call clinician. If they reject all that, or hang up, you then have to report them to their PCP or on call clinician who will then call them back and try to convince them otherwise. If you don't perform any of those steps on a single 911 call, you fail for the whole month. Rude patients can be abusive, and if you have any self respect and hang up on them, management might see it as not wanting to take a call, then fail you for not meeting quota. There's so much more to say, but it really isn't a fulfilling career with Optum, best try for Kaiser or another company.