Overcoming Revenue Cycle Management Staffing Challenges
By Stephen Gorman, CEO, RCxRules
Hiring and retaining staff in the healthcare field is a challenge that isn’t going away anytime soon. The pandemic has taken a serious toll on healthcare workers across the industry, and the ever-evolving work landscape is tough to keep up with.
According to an MGMA Stat poll conducted in September 2021, 75% of medical practice leaders ranked staffing as their biggest challenge heading into 2022. Recruiters are facing a persistent
lack of candidates for open roles combined with record-high turnover rates. Add to these ongoing pandemic challenges like lengthy quarantines, forced time off due to school closures, and vaccine mandate resistance, and revenue cycle management staffing challenges can seem insurmountable. Given all these challenges, it’s essential for medical organizations to make the most of the billing and coding staff they do have.
That’s where revenue cycle management process improvements come in. MGMA states that 76%of practices reported changing their operations last year to handle staffing shortages. By leveraging technology to reduce manual effort, medical groups can optimize their staff’s time and energy by enabling them to focus on only the most important tasks. As Elise Myers, VP of Revenue Cycle Clinical Revenue Integrity at Providence Health & Services explains in a recent interview with Becker’s Hospital Review, “The more you can automate low-level tasks, the more dollars you’ll have available to hire people to handle more complex, strategic tasks.”
Technology can also help tackle the issue of turnover and the need to train new staff. Important billing and coding information often ends up living in spreadsheets, on sticky notes, or even
inside a seasoned employee’s brain—none of which are ideal when you’re facing staffing changes. By creating a rule repository that’s custom-built for their organization, revenue cycle leads can be confident their teams’ tasks are done the same way every time, regardless of employee experience.
Learn more about how the RCxRules Revenue Cycle Engine turns your team’s unique knowledge and expertise into highly tailored, automated rules that autocorrect billing and coding errors at www.RCxRules.com.
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