4 Tips Leaders Should Consider During a Rev Tech Rollout

Best practices for the successful implementation of technology into your revenue cycle.

While helping the Healthcare Financial Management Association (HFMA) and FinThrive develop its Revenue Cycle Management Technology Adoption Model, Shanda Richards, understood that what health systems need is to free staff from repetitive tasks to handle more complex tasks.

The revenue cycle director at Central Peninsula Hospital in Soldotna, Alaska offered these best practices for leaders to consider when implementing revenue cycle technology solutions:

Have a strategy

"Don't just go off being reactionary, where you're solving the next problem with software. [Focus on] what you really need instead of being sold on what somebody's trying to sell you. Then, interview multiple vendors to get demonstrations and have a list of your deliverables ready."

Put aside your pride

"Don’t try to prove all the good work you've done, because if you're overselling what your current functionality is, or your current automation levels, then what you get out of it is only as good as what you put in. If you're overstating or being prideful about it, then you're not going to get good results, and you're going to miss things that you do need that you don't fully have but you said you already did."

Learn from the technologies you’re looking into

"There are things in the FinThrive Survey that are very emerging technologies, and I read some of them and like the name of them, and I didn't even know what they were. Then I hovered over it, [read] the description, and didn't realize that our industry could do that.

They built the survey to last into the future, so things that were brand new on the market, they added into the survey so that it would be relevant three to five years from now."

Get staff onboard

"An analogy that I used to give my new hires ... is that working in revenue cycle in healthcare is like being a private investigator without the fear of getting hurt.

I need you to discover and figure things out, but as the years have progressed now I have to say I need you to be a private investigator, but 80% of the time you're going to be a mall cop and you're just going to be writing tickets all the time.

But you're really going to love that 20% where you actually get to use your brain and sleuth around.

And so I assure you if you use that analogy and then talk about the software implementation, it's going back to the fact that ... software and technology [can] take care of the parking tickets so that you can go back to being the private investigator."

Editor's note: This story was updated on 12/21/2023.