Support To Your Staff To Allow Them To Do More With Less
By Teri Gatchel-Schmidt, MBA, CPC, VP, Consulting & Business Development, SYNERGEN Health
Twitter: @SYNERGENHealth
Over the past three years, industries across the nation have felt the effects of labor shortages – but none more than the healthcare industry. Few organizations have effectively traversed the nationwide exodus of labor, whether struggling to find new workers or retain old ones. Teams across the nation suffer from physical and emotional stress, and many have headed to the exit doors, but this isn’t a brand-new development.
Far before the “Great Resignation” or “Great Reshuffle,” health care staff were weighed down by monotonous manual tasks that led to an increased workload, taking focus away from care delivery. Already feeling overworked and undervalued, COVID-19 only exacerbated the underlying issues impacting health care workers’ burdens. Staffing issues intensified by the public health crisis have left CFOs playing defense, with high turnover rates causing a decrease in productivity and an increase in aged receivables.
Revenue cycle management = resource management
Many health care practices now struggle to keep up with specific administrative tasks due to a lack of experienced staff and technological support. Revenue cycle management is one such area that calls for digital intervention to eliminate the labor gap. The ever-growing complexity of the payer-provider relationship has significantly impacted medical billing and reimbursement regulations. Paired with a lack of staffing, it remains difficult for health care organizations to maintain revenue cycle efficiencies.
Although June showed hope for employment in the health care sector, with 56,700 workers joining the industry, the pandemic’s indelible influence continues forcing revenue cycle leaders to do more with less. Organizations understand they must make changes to their operations and processes to keep their revenue cycle running at optimal efficiency. Health care organizations are faced with the option to allocate resources to take on mundane administrative tasks or invest in automation.
Turning to technology automation
Organizations can do more with less through intelligent automation. When pairing automated technology with best practices to empower operational teams, revenue cycle leaders will streamline workflows to reduce manual work. Now is the time for Health care decision-makers to consider a long-term revenue cycle strategy that leverages technology tools to create a resilient staffing model that streamlines administrative processes across the entire end-to-end revenue cycle process.
By integrating technology like machine learning and robotic process automation into revenue cycle processes to perform repetitive, manual tasks, staff can focus on more value-driven tasks. For example, claims and denials management is one such task that can be vastly improved when automated. Manual errors during charge capture can be detrimental; automating the claims review process circumvents human error and speeds up the time to cash. Machine learning models process large amounts of claims, recognizing complex denial patterns while determining the required solution – improving efficiency while reducing aged receivables. By integrating these automation tools, health care providers can seamlessly scale, support, and streamline their revenue infrastructure to reduce operating costs, optimize payer-provider collaboration, and ultimately handle the fluctuations in volume.
Understanding where there are breakdowns and opportunities to automate manual processes across the revenue cycle is critical for any health care organization’s success. Investing in a hybrid digital workforce is a great place to start. Prevent employee burnout and keep up with shifts in patient volumes by giving your staff the automation tools they need to meet the changing needs of the organization. The way organizations approach staffing and resource allocation over the coming years will determine not only whether they survive, but whether they thrive.