How To Be A Revenue Cycle Ally: 5 Tips For Effective Communication With Managed Care Staff

The revenue cycle management environment is shifting, and in an age of cost-conscious healthcare, the people on the ground are going to be the ones who make the real difference when it comes to client retention.

It’s tempting to focus your efforts on keeping execs and leadership happy, but your project managers and other staff hold a lot of power, much of it wielded in simple communication with facility personnel.

I want to cover five (actionable) points that I’ve found helpful in keeping hospital managed care staff happy — all of them simple, communication-based concepts.

Learn Their Pain Points

…Over, and over, and over again. We all know they’re worried about contracts and insurance policy changes, but individually, what’s making their lives difficult? Is it an Aetna denial processing change that’s impacted 2 years’ worth of claims? Has an update to the EHR system made their day-to-day twice as hard? Whatever it is, make a note of it and mention it occasionally.

Frequently the things that will win over a managed care director or staff member aren’t the same things that won over the client at large.

Be A Resource

This one is huge and simple.

I can’t count how many times I would shoot off a short email with some piece of information (like United changing the codes they’d allow for cardiac cath claims or a shift in Aetna’s appeal deadline) and it being met with gratitude from my facility contacts, and in turn, positive reviews up the chain of command.

This is elemental and ties into the first point…take a couple of minutes even once a month, to dig for information related to their work, and send an email…something with a straightforward, direct title like “Tip On Getting United Card Cath Paid”. Even if they already know what you’re talking about, you’ll be selling yourself as an ally in their work.

Understand Their World

I once had a contact at a small hospital that was simply buried in contracts — years on top of years of expired documents, missing amendments, and lost insurance contacts. It was by far the most challenging project (contract-wise) that I ever worked on. The facility as a whole decided not to partner with the company I was with at the time, but the manager made sure to tell my VP that if it had been up to him, based on his experience with me, he would have kept us on.

Now, I’m not tooting my own horn here and don’t think I did anything special…a bit of chatting about his wife and career plans maybe, but nothing intense. The only thing I did was frame myself as an ally in tackling his contract problem.

Once he felt I was on his side, keeping him satisfied as a customer was much easier.

This all started with asking in-depth questions at the start of our relationship to really understand what his work was about. Since you probably understand your business, you may assume you already get rev cycle problems, and I don’t doubt that you do…what you don’t get though, is what those problems look like filtered through your clients’ and contacts’ eyes. That’s the world you’re looking to understand.

Keep Them In The Loop

Managed care people (and billing managers, and finance staff…) tend to be incredibly, massively busy putting out fires, cleaning up backlogs, and dealing with regulations. Reaching out with quick, concise, bulleted emails between calls or face-to-face interactions will always be appreciated.

The key there though is to keep information useful. Be a source of information, but not just for the sake of making noise.

Give Gifts

I’m not talking about sending a $100 fruit arrangement here. I specifically mean gifts that simplify their lives and again, touch on those pain points.

It could be something as simple as pulling an updated fee schedule or sending over a new contact for medical records requests. They don’t even have to be frequent, as long as they’re useful and pertinent to what makes their days difficult.

So that’s it…give one or two of those a shot and see what kind of response you get. In the meantime, if you’re interested in receiving more information like this, sign up for our newsletter below.