Employee turnover is one of healthcare’s biggest challenges. A study by Compdata Surveys discovered the average turnover in healthcare jobs in 2017 was 20.6%, up from 15.6% in 2010. With the complexity of Revenue Cycle Management (RCM) for healthcare organizations and the changing landscape of reimbursement models, a strong team is your life blood.
The amount of training and knowledge an RCM employee has can be extensive and expensive, not to mention the cost of hiring/training a new employee. A consultant and faculty member for the American College of Healthcare Executives, estimated the average cost of an employee is $60,000 and if an organization loses 20% of 3,000 employees with an average salary of $45,000, that totals to $27 million! On top of being understaffed, your department would still be responsible for maintaining cash flow, as well as tracking down and mitigating denials.
Overwhelmed yet? It's clear that employee turnover is extremely important to RCM success, so we’ve put together 3 tips on how to survive it.
- Engage Your Current Employees
Stop perpetuating the cycle. If your team is understaffed, they may feel overwhelmed trying to meet their own job requirements while picking up slack from an empty position. It’s important to engage with staff to understand their challenges or points of conflicts to prevent future turnover.
Harvard Business Review studied employment at Facebook and found the people who were most likely to quit were those who didn’t enjoy their jobs, were underutilized, or had no growth opportunities.
Putting an engagement plan into place will help with long-term retention goals and in turn should help maintain high RCM performance. Also allowing for opportunities for staff to contribute to longer term goals or industry shifts like value-based and self-pay reimbursement. It’s a win-win.
- Give Employees the Tools They Need to Get Their Work Done
"When you look at estimates of turnover costs, people often dismiss the cost of productivity and the value of job performance," said Ted Kinney, PhD, Director of Research and Development of Select International. Making sure employees have the latest tools to increase performance is imperative to their productivity, individual success, and your organization’s fiscal success.
Barbara Tapscott, CHFP, CPAM, Geisinger’s Vice President of Revenue Management and winner of the MAP Award for High Performance in Revenue Cycle from the Healthcare Financial Management Association (HFMA), also underscores the investment of the right tools and credits technology to her organization’s success. “We have significant investment in technology to manage administrative costs and routine transactions,” she stated. “We want people to be engaged and not necessarily be doing transactions that are routine. We can engage technology for that. These best practices and this focus on providing education and retention strategies for our staff have paid off.”
By ensuring you have efficient processes and value-added technology, you’re increasing staff productivity, while also investing in your employee’s professional development
- Retain Employee Knowledge
The more knowledgeable your staff is, the more efficient and successful your organization will be. However, if you’re consistently replacing staff, it’s difficult to retain the coding, billing, payer and specialty-specific knowledge. As David Catoe, a FHFMA and Assistant Vice President of Financial Services said, “By holding onto your brain trust, you can more easily work through problems and plan for improvements.” A solid system needs to be in place to collect the organization’s and department’s knowledge with the ability to train new staff to be successful.
The facts are there, putting a master plan in place to address retention is invaluable to your organization’s financial success. RCxRules can provide tremendous value in this process by capturing your RCM team’s billing/coding expertise and loading that into our Rules engine. This allows every employee to access the most contemporary and accurate information in real time as they are processing their work. It’s like having your best employee available to shadow and mentor everyone in the company every day.
The technology creates greater efficiencies for your team, reducing repetitive work, while also reducing the risks of manual error and expensive rework.
So as part of your master plan, don’t forget to Request an Overview to learn more about RCxRules. It’s so worth it, in so many ways.
Sources:
- https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/finance/will-2018-be-the-year-healthcare-addresses-its-turnover-problem.html
- https://www.healthcarefinancenews.com/news/cure-healthcares-high-employee-turnover-engagement-expert-says
- http://www.os-healthcare.com/blog/high-business-office-staff-turnover-rural-hospitals
- https://hbr.org/2018/01/why-people-really-quit-their-jobs
- https://www.hfma.org/Content.aspx?id=50309&pagesid=2
- https://revcycleintelligence.com/news/geisinger-lowers-turnover-for-healthcare-revenue-cycle-success
- https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/human-capital-and-risk/3-factors-driving-high-turnover-at-your-hospital-and-what-to-do-about-them.html
