COVER STORY · REVENUE CYCLE MANAGEMENT
Can Automation Fix Revenue Cycle
Management’s Staffi ng Problem? Experts and RCM leaders in the trenches see plenty of opportunities along with the challenges, as the healthcare system moves forward on a long journey towards optimization of both technology and processes By Mark Hagland
A
s everyone in healthcare knows, the COVID-19 pandemic turned out to be devastating not only in terms of
the number of lives lost and the illness that it caused, as well as the pressure on clinicians and other healthcare workers; it also created an unanticipated rearrange- ment of the job recruitment nationwide. As senior leaders in hospitals, clinics, and
health systems nationwide sent workers home to work remotely whenever possible, because of the intensive danger of infec- tions in the fi rst months of the pandemic, an unexpected thing happened: suddenly, health systems were competing for non- clinician workers not just with local com- petitor organizations, but nationwide—and even across other industries. That became particularly true in such areas as revenue cycle management (RCM), where already a certain percentage of staff were working remotely. Very quickly, the job recruitment market in RCM became almost entirely nationalized, meaning that RCM leaders at a hospital in Buffalo were now competing
for workers with hospitals in Cleveland, Atlanta, Albuquerque, and beyond. At the same time, hospital, medical
group and health system leaders were already moving forward to advance their leveraging of robotic process automation (RPA) tools, automating many of the most routine and non-conceptual tasks in the revenue cycle management area, while beginning to dip their collective big toe into the swimming pool of actual machine learning (ML) and artifi cial intelligence (AI). So what’s been happening since then? Has the leveraging of automation begun to enhance operations and balance out long-term staffi ng challenges? The pandemic has defi nitely nationalized
the recruiting market. It created a larger pool of competition, but at the same time, also a larger pool of opportunity. So, availability of resources, competition for that availability. The pool of available resources has signifi - cantly improved, based on the nationaliza- tion and the willingness to shift employees into a remote or a hybrid environment. The
4
hcinnovationgroup.com | JULY/AUGUST 2023
challenge is that everybody sees the same thing and is pursuing the same goals. So how you go about this and how quickly you can move, matter a lot. “Automation is absolutely turning out to
be a contributor to how you can mitigate some of your staffi ng challenges; in fact, it factors in, in a couple of different ways,” says Jim Akimchuk, a managing director at the Naperville, Ill.-based Impact Advisors consulting fi rm. “There is a level of what we do that is repetitive and easily automated, based on cause- effect and action- reaction types of scenarios. Where it’s really helped in that space has been in the area of more closely directing our revenue cycle folks to a focused
Jim Akimchuk
area. If I throw 1,000 marbles in with one yellow one, it’s harder to fi nd that one marble, than if 200.” Automation, he says, is
88327191© Hilchtime|
Dreamstime.com Olemedia/E+/Getty Images
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36
