Skills In Patient Accounting

The best way for a supervisor in patient accounting to keep his job during hard times and get promoted during better times is to put himself in his boss' place.

Analyze the challenges the boss must face. Determine what skills the boss values in meeting these challenges. Show him that you have those.

To identify and display the computer skills today's Director of Patient Accounting values most, first examine why hospitals decide to automate patient accounting in the first place.

Typically there are three reasons with benefits with each:

1) Receive payment quicker and at lower cost. What you think is true. Today's payors look for any reason to delay payment. With electronic claims submission and electronic payment, there are fewer excuses.
2) Report Generation. Information systems can now provide comparative data for any payor on its patients, the numbers, diagnostic codes, average remittance and other important data. Without this, contract negotiations are simply guesswork.
3) Elbow Room. Going paperless means more physical space. Every hospital and every patient accounting department wants it.

Which skills does the Director of Patient Accounting value most?

1) Customer Service. Especially at patient registration. By knowing every resource of the hospital, all co-workers, all departments, the trust and teamwork that's developed will show through. A sensitivity to patients and their families is also critical.
2) A self-starter who sees the big picture and manages their tasks with that macro perspective in mind.
3) Loyalty and Longevity. Employee training is an investment. It takes time to learn the organization. Employee turnover hurts these efforts.
4) Computer Skills. The ability to load the patient billing form at admission, following the money through the system to collection and generate reports for administration.
5) Openness to Change. In patient accounting and information systems, rapid change is inevitable.

As you can see, these skills and attitudes are not primarily keyboard or programming skills. That's because what seems like an MIS revolution is being driven by an even more important industry evolution That is the movements to prospective payment managed care and competition. These changes are the driving force. The computer has become just the tool of the trade.

And quite a pervasive tool. Now with painstaking customer service and proper patient registration at admission, order-entry during the patient's stay in the hospital, medical record's diagnostic coding entered directly into the system, electronic claims submission, and electronic payment that posts the remittance into the patient's account, there is not a manual step in the process. And that's why the Patient Accounting department will eliminate FTE's and demand better skills, attitudes, and training from its remaining staff.

It is a long way from typewriters, keypunch cards, and clerks sharing cubicles with paper tickler follow-up files. Today's most valued employee will be trained and comfortable in the changing how's and why's of this electronic world, and emotionally sensitive to those hospital patients and families who have shorter time and higher priorities than becoming computer literate themselves.

Entrust your confidential search to us.

Vickers Chambless Managed Search
400 Perimeter Center Terrace, NE
Suite 900
Atlanta, Georgia 30346
Phone: (404) 365-0030
Fax: (404) 231-1351