One of the biggest challenges facing revenue cycle management today is the productivity of the workforce. With the shift to remote and hybrid work environments over the past few years, it has become much harder to manage the day-to-day activities of a revenue cycle staff.
Core functions like denials and cash collection used to be managed from a central location. Managers sitting a few steps away from the staff made it easy to monitor the team – keeping them focused and on task while lending a hand when something complicated arose.
Now that remote work has entered the equation, it has become nearly impossible for management teams to have the oversight required to deliver exceptional results for their systems. Let’s examine some of the biggest problems the industry faces:
Worker Mobility
Once it became clear that workers could be effective working remotely, many job seekers decided that they didn’t want to work from an office again. For better or worse, many folks in the talent pool want remote work only, and if that’s not an option, they will find a job elsewhere. Five years ago, that would have been difficult to do. But now that the industry has embraced remote work, rev cycle staff can work for any hospital system in the U.S. regardless of their physical location as long as they have an internet connection and cell phone.
Wage Competition
Because hospital systems are able to hire talent from anywhere, we have seen an uptick in corporate poaching. Major systems with very healthy financials are able to offer 10-25% more to lure top-notch employees away from their current jobs. That type of financial gain is too great for workers to turn down in most cases and is enough to turn even the most loyal employees.
Effort Monitoring
While many systems have implemented worker monitoring solutions like Kronos, those tools are incapable of validating a worker’s true effort. It’s great to see how many phone calls or talk time someone has each day, but it’s easy to spoof. Some of the systems we have spoken with have found out recently that many of their key employees are actually working multiple jobs but have made it look like they are working a full day with their system.
Effectiveness
Without being able to see and hear your staff working denials or cash collection, how do you know they are doing it well? The answer is, you don’t. Not anymore. The best you can do is pull a bunch of reports from disparate systems and try and pivot table your way to some insights. For most of our partners, the insights gained are minimal, and the effort expended is vast. The key to driving effective behavior comes from aggregating the data into dashboards that provide actionable insights. Without them, you are flying blind and aren’t capable of coaching your team up to produce better results.
At Healthrise, we have developed a Worker Productivity Management Solution that improves cash collection, reduces denials, increases worker efficiency, and reduces costs. The solution combines our proprietary technologies with our industry-leading revenue cycle management playbook to deliver the meaningful impact hospital systems have been clamoring for. If you are experiencing any of the challenges above with your rev cycle team, please reach out to us to learn more about our workforce management solution. You will be glad you did. It’s a multi-million dollar game-changer.