Two revenue cycle leaders recently spoke to Becker's about how their roles are evolving:
Sheldon Pink. Vice president of revenue cycle at Luminis Health (Annapolis, Md.):
For us, what's evolving from an RCM standpoint is that we're much more involved in IT. Because of the evolution of machine learning and robotic process automation, the IT and revenue cycle will be hand-in-hand to the point where we might have integrated departments. The reason is that we're moving toward automation, and you need to understand the business. Typically, the marriage between us is twofold. First, IT has the technical skill set to speak the language of scripting and writing code, whereas operations knows what we want the code to say. So we must marry the parts together to make an optimal solution for our organization.
The other piece is that we will have to be project managers. I noticed within the revenue cycle that our team members have a solid skill set for the defined root cause, and we're very good at pointing out where different areas in operations are having issues. However, the evolutionary change will consist of partnering with operations and helping them solve problems. In all fairness, we don't expect case managers to be project managers. We can tell them what's wrong, but they may need revenue cycle's help to turn around and say, 'All right, how do we operationalize this for us but still be able to do our job?' I think that's where the evolution of the revenue cycle is going.
Randolph Siwabessy. CFO at University of California Irvine Health:
I have been in this role for more than a year now, coming from another Southern California academic health system. I’m very lucky to be able to partner closely with our CEO and the dynamic and execution-focused team of leaders that he has assembled. Within finance, our team has primary responsibility over areas ranging from government reimbursement, accounting and financial planning analysis to revenue cycle, patient access, clinical documentation integrity and managed care contracting. Given this broad portfolio, we are able to partner with colleagues across the enterprise to understand opportunities and connect the dots, identify financial opportunities and determine the financial impact of various initiatives.
Population health is also an area that we are paying close attention to right now. For example, the finance team portfolio includes our expanding ACO. With all this in mind, I see that my primary responsibility is to serve as a business partner to our operators and strategists so that we can enable prudent stewardship of our resources. I expect that my role will continue to evolve in support of my colleagues.