Chem 481: Advanced Puzzle-making

This chart should look somewhat familiar to anyone who has taken a biochemistry course. When I first saw a chart similar to this in class, I nearly cried. The complexity of this puzzle was overwhelming. Not only did we have to learn how to piece the chart together again from scratch, we had to know how each step of it all worked. I'm not going to lie, I probably deserved an F but somehow got a B+? I ended up departing from my original plan of a clinical path (not because of biochem) and decided on pursuing an administrative career in healthcare. I now deal with trying to learn this...

I know this is a chart that was intentionally developed to look confusing as some anti-Obama propaganda, but my point stands... Our healthcare system is so complex that we need specialists to understand its different systems. The same way we have "dermatologists" to understand the skin, we have "credentialists" to understand the process of registering a physician with the appropriate insurance agencies. We have "cardiologists" to understand the human heart and "billing specialists" to understand the medical bills that we send to patients. 

My goal is to understand this second chart, its different interactions, the catalysts that drive it, and how to manipulate it to improve outcomes. I hope to be able to explain what I learn at the "introduction to biology" level. That's the purpose of this blog: to explain this mess in plain English.