Hiring and retaining healthcare staff is a challenge that isn’t going away soon. The pandemic has taken a toll on healthcare workers in both clinical and office settings, and the ever-evolving work landscape is tough to keep up with.

According to a recent MGMA Stat poll, 75% of medical practice leaders ranked staffing as their biggest challenge. Recruiters face a persistent lack of candidates for open roles, combined with record-high turnover rates. Add to that ongoing pandemic-related challenges — like quarantines, forced time off due to school closures, and vaccine mandate resistance — and revenue cycle management staffing challenges seem insurmountable. It’s essential for medical organizations to make the most of the billing and coding staff they do have. 

That’s why revenue cycle management process improvements are crucial. 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 told 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.”

For example, in most revenue cycle workflows there are routine errors that lead to claim holds that coders must correct over and over. By creating custom rules themselves to autocorrect these issues, revenue cycle management teams can minimize the number of claim holds and free up staff time to focus on more complex work.

Technology can also help tackle turnover challenges and the need to train new staff. Important billing and coding information often ends up in spreadsheets, on sticky notes, or even inside a seasoned employee’s brain. Relying on outdated methods to store important billing information can pose a lot of risks. By creating a rule repository that’s custom-built for their organization, revenue cycle leads can be confident their teams’ tasks are done the uniform, organized, and secure way every time, regardless of employee experience.

This content was written by and republished with permission from RCxRules. To learn more about how the RCxRules Revenue Cycle Engine enables your team to efficiently create their own highly tailored, automated rules that autocorrect billing and coding errors, visit the athenahealth Marketplace.