If you’ve looked at trends of the future of work, you might have noticed something interesting. You’ll see points like hybrid flexibility, addressing employee mental health, closing soft skills gaps, and taking on data privacy.
While these might not look like they immediately apply to healthcare on its face, there is one area where the future of work in healthcare can and does keep up with trends outside the industry — hospital revenue cycle management. At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, revenue cycle departments were some of the first to dive into the benefits of remote work — 75% of health systems and large hospitals considered permanent changes to how they managed their revenue cycle in the early days of the pandemic. This was a shift that I believe created inertia that revenue cycle leaders should be capitalizing on — pioneering the future of work in healthcare organizations.
Consider that “remote first” strategies are popping up among some of the most innovative tech startups. Companies like Velocity Global, for example, that don’t ask “how do we return to work”, instead focusing on connection between people. But these strategies are also making the list of future trends for hospital revenue cycle management staff. When clinical and other in-person staff will have to wait on future innovations, RCM departments can move forward. For example, look at the University of Kansas Health System — in response to pandemic-related disruption, they’ve invested in their IT department and launched productivity and quality metrics for both remote and on-site staff .
But this is just the beginning. Revenue cycle leaders who step into solutions like remote work, hybrid models, modern outsourcing and generationally-aware employee engagement can blaze new trails — even positioning themselves as leaders of the future of work in their organization.
This is why I hope hospital revenue cycle leaders will look beyond remote work and see that they have more flexibility than they have in the history of their careers to be an example and lead the way to a future of healthcare.
