ICE Magazine August 2022

SPOTLIGHT

Off Clock THE

DENNIS CHALTRAW, DIRECTOR OF REVENUE CYCLE MANAGEMENT, OREGON IMAGING CENTERS

BY MATT SKOUFALOS

A

bout 20 years ago, Dennis Chaltraw remembers leaving an insurance industry leadership conference with an important takeaway from the featured speaker. He doesn’t recollect the specific phrasing, but the takeaway was, “Regardless of how hard you work, make sure you bring balance into your life, and find a way to live outside of work.”

“There was something about this that made me realize what I was not doing,” Chaltraw said. “I had this huge briefcase of work, and would truck it home every night with the best of intention of getting it done. After 20 years of grinding it out in the insurance and finance industries, I had to find a way to push myself in other directions.”

“For people who are in high-volume, high-pressure careers, you can really enjoy what you do outside of work because your work is really stable and pretty consistent,” he said. “But once you start not doing anything, you keep not doing anything; a body at rest tends to stay at rest.”

Chaltraw reflected upon his interests. A former athlete, he began searching for opportunities to reconnect with the sports he played in his youth. He decided to start by umpiring his daughter’s softball games. That choice led Chaltraw down a path that eventually took him deep into officiating duties with USA Softball, the national governing body of softball.

“I have a tendency to throw myself into situations that I know are going to make me uncomfortable,” he said. “Officiating is a great example of putting yourself in new and 16

ICEMAGAZINE | AUGUST 2022

challenging positions. As soon as I made the decision to take officiating seriously, an entire new world opened up, and it was something far different from my career in health care finance. I call it getting back on the field.”

Chaltraw soon learned that he’d needed to rely on more than his individual passion for the sport to do the job capably. In short order, he was introduced to the infrastructure of softball: game mechanics, case studies, positioning, and its hefty rules book. Beyond knowing and loving the sport itself, Chaltraw began to learn how to anticipate the play as an official; where to catch the optimal line of sight to best see through the play and to obtain the best possible angle to make a call. He kept up with officiating after his daughter was done with the sport, and by then, the game had its hooks in him once more.

Dennis Chaltraw with three high school umpires from Bend, Oregon.

ADVANCING THE IMAGING PROFESSIONAL