Revenue Cycle Pros Are Going To Stay Home

This isn’t news for me to state that many of the clients and candidates I talk to on a daily basis are at varying stages of shock at how far things have changed in a few months. People who used to huddle together in small teams in monolithic but chic office buildings are now ONLY hiring people with high speed internet in their homes. *This prerequisite will not be going away, even if they get back to the building, because they need folks that can work from home at a moment’s notice.

As many of these people are healthcare providers or the revenue cycle pros that keep these companies profitable, my mind had to wander to how their industry, the industry I support, is going to be impacted long term.

The companies that transition to understanding that these remote working models are not only safer, but more efficient will be able to set up strategies to allow them to rapidly attract talent from the marketplace. Talent that wants a safe, efficient, less expensive way to work.

I’m seeing clients that prized contained teams in silos across massive multi story layouts using terms like, “we may never go back to that building.” And while nobody wants to switch employers in the middle of a Covid stream, the talent from company “A” has friends at companies “B-Z” and they are talking. The companies that are investing in hardware, technologies and processes, and managing effectively (doing it right) are getting all talent’s attention. (Not just their own employees' attention.)

Medical coding was one of the first industry tasks completed remotely by many revenue cycle shops. Covid has taught us, however, that with the communication tools available today, there is virtually (pun) no step in the revenue cycle that can’t be completed from, say, Conway, Arkansas, even if you are serving a healthcare provider in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. (Provided you understand the nuances of the applicable government and commercial payers you are dealing with.)

Time to take the remote working success lessons learned as “best practice tent poles” for strategies of a more permanent remote work structure in the future.

I spent over 15 years volunteering with Junior Chamber International (leadership development) and one term we used, that I have heard others use, is Train the Trainer. It is time we start training our managers to lead remote teams effectively. The ones who stack up those results are going to be very much in demand as the marketplace evolves.

The good news: with more people working revenue cycle in remote situations, the more naturally they will learn effective ways to receive leadership from a remote manager; and thus how to be effective remote leaders in their own right.