Explore how Currance Can Scale Revenue Cycle Teams Up and Down

By: Scott Gunther, Chief People & Experience Officer 

Staffing shortages are a big problem for our industry — and the challenge goes beyond the Great Resignation. Across the country, revenue cycle management leaders are dealing with new challenges such as volume and payor mix fluctuations while needing to do more with less staff, while recruiting and training the people they already have. 

We know that staffing can be complicated. That’s why Currance built a flexible business model for our clients, allowing them to flex up and down their staffing needs, seamlessly and effectively.  

Some clients use hundreds of Currance team members for support, while other clients only need twenty Currance team members. Sometimes, a client needs a lot of team members at the beginning of their contract, but does not need as many after 90 or 180 days. Or vice versa. Whatever the situation, we can help with scaling up or down to adjust.

Many customers ask us how we do this. Here are a few insights into how we’ve been able to structure this flexible staffing model:  

Being an employer of choice  

We want the best of the best people to join Currance. We’re focused on culture, a certification based onboarding experience, competitive compensation, along with engagement and recognition programs. Not only do all these elements matter to our team members, but they matter to our clients. Our clients can look at everything we do for our team and say, “Oh, wow. Currance has some differentiating factors when it comes to hiring, training and sustaining of staff.”

As Chief People & Experience Officer at Currance, I know how important it is to get to know our team members on a personal level. Competing vendors take a different approach. They go heavy on the procedural, but may not place an equal premium on the personal side of the people working for them. That dissonance — seeing people as “workers,” not as “people” — does not drive results. Engaging people in the process does. In fact I go into more detail about how we engage our revenue cycle associates in my previous blog, “Why Currance Built High Performance Work Teams”. 

We know how to train agents 

Although we have expert leads, supervisors and managers, agents are only deployed after being fully trained and certified. Each agent goes through a 30-day training where they become fully certified in all the areas they’ll be exposed to — HIPAA and PHI, etc. Training matters, but so does the interview process. The backbone to great interviews is behavioral-based questions. Asking these types of questions helps makes sure we’re hiring for the right fit — not just to fill a seat. In addition, we’ve created pre-testing assessments. Results from these tests help us see who can be the best fit for each role.   

We’re hiring very credentialed, highly trained and certified team members who consistently know how to get the job done. It’s not a place for a bunch of new hires to figure it out. It’s not a place for unskilled or uncertified people. Our team members can jump from working on government to commercial payers; from denials to appeals — on any EHR.  

Performance reporting and monitoring is key 

Documentation and communication are how we’re able to maximize yield. Here’s a quick look at what we offer:  

• Our Collab App is the basis for the remote work environment designed for revenue cycle associates to work across the team to resolve problems in real-time 
• Daily shift briefings to walk through problems identified to see if they can be prevented 
• Specialized team and individual scorecards based on our patented yield methodology and analytics tool 

Working seamlessly alongside your current team 

We know that your current revenue team members might be wondering who we are and what we do. When a health system enters into a partnership with us, we overcommunicate what’s happening. We even have a process around our overcommunication methods. Whether it’s co-facilitating conversations with hospital staff, patient access teams, coders, nurses and/or doctors — we want to let your staff know who we are and what we do.  

Communicating what we’re doing is key because we don’t want anyone to think: “Who are these Currance people? They aren’t part of our team.” Explaining who we are — meaningfully and early — gives everyone the feeling of, “I’ve known who Currance is from the beginning. I’ve been brought to the meetings and discussions and I’m part of the journey.”  

And then, once you feel like we’re part of your team, it’s up to us to perform. And that’s exactly what we do best.  

I’m passionate about how we support flexibility for our customers, especially in scaling high performance revenue cycle teams. Feel free to reach out to us with any questions at sales@currance.com or join the conversation with us on Currance | LinkedIn.