Is it Time To Allow Revenue Cycle Employees to Work From home?

INTRODUCTION

Within the next few years, managing revenue cycle employees from their homes might be normal business practice for many healthcare providers. As a result, revenue cycle managers may find themselves forced to respond to an all-new set of needs and concerns from their staff. This report explains what telecommuting is, describes the pros and cons of telecommuting and describes the challenges of managing revenue cycle employees working from home.

Some facilities, such as the Cleveland Clinic, enables employees to telecommute and perform patient pre-registration, shceduling and financial counseling. Other facilities such as Texas Health Resources, who operates 25 cute care hospitals, has a virtual office revenue cycle which is now 100%.

A common perception of the telecommuting worker is the slacker who enjoys the luxuries of home while "working". Some studies have found that telecommuters work more hours than traditional office workers.

Working from home requires a different skillset and work ethic than working in-house. A productive in-office employee might not be a productive at home or vice versa. A magical employee who is productive regardless of location does exist, but not everyone may be adaptable.

This article includes tips for managing telecommuting employees.

The Pros: What is Great About Telecommuting Work

The benefits, or pros, of working from home range from higher productivity to reduced office-space costs. Many people believe that working from home means higher productiviy. This is becasue there are fewer distrations from office politics and socializing.

When you open your revenue cycle department to telecommuting workers, your potential talent pool expands immensely. If the best candidates do not live within commuting distance and not willing to reason, your department ca still benefit from their skills. This can be very beneficial to rural hospital that find it challenging to finding and hiring local talented staff.

You won't have to worry about a commute. Not commuting every day not only saves the employees hundreds of dollars a year but also greatly reduces their stress for the workday ahead. More productivity time. The hour to get ready and commute is directed toward project management or team conversations.

Flexibility for working parents. More family and ok time increases the quality of life for empoyees and their familities.

Employers who offer telecommuting opportunites appea more appealing to new employees and, addtinally, reduce the turnover rate of existing employees.

The Cons: Challenges of Telecommuting Work Arrangements

It is much easier to get your point across while directly viewing materials with someone. Interactions can be quicker and more straightforward in person, and it is also easier to explain and resolve different viewpoints face-to-face.

Staff management is always a challenge, but managing remote staff is even more so. Thoughtful planning, clearly communicated expectations, and a system of monitoring are required elements to ensure high productivity and quality of reviews.

All PHI must be encrypted before being transmitted. This can either be through the company’s Intranet or using the internet email encryption.

HIPAA primary and secondary rules do not prohibit remote access, but they do require that organizations implement appropriate safeguards to ensure the privacy and security of protected health information (PHI).

A remote manager’s worst nightmare is the idea that an employee is running personal errands on the company dime.

Often remote employees get little recognition.

Ideas suffer from lack of feedback and brainstorming. Innovation is not time-bound to a clock, and when employees only have an hour here or there scheduled for brainstorming, the process can lose its energetic excitement. People who are not around each other long enough do not collaborate on ideas naturally.  

Tips for Managing Remote Employees

• Have clear productivity goals. As a revenue cycle manager, your primary concern should not be to manage tasks since employees know what to do. Once you give them instructions on the goals and objectives, have faith that they are can fulfill the role they were hired to do. Instead, your focus should be on setting productivity goals, and on results and outcomes.
• Use different channels of communication. You should ensure that employees can get in touch with you using different modes of communication, ranging from HD video conferencing (such as having staff meetings with skype in Outlook) and phone meetings to simple (IM chatting or emailing. This will ensure that employees can communicate about different aspects, ranging from assignments to a personal issue.
• Having remote workers clock in and out, attend video meetings and copy you when submitting their work, you’ll make them more accountable.
• Review VPN logs to discern just what, exactly it remote employees have been up to.
• You need to have a clear policy on teleworking. This policy must outline risks that remote workers have and emphasis how to reduce those risks. 
• Deploy consistent security measures. You need to implement basic security measures for laptops such as full disk encryption, malicious software protection, VPN, firewall, content filtering,
• Provide guidance, communicate and take responsibility for managing people.
• Work with human resources to ensure workers’ compensation will cover your employees into their home environment. It is a good idea to develop workstation design guidelines and offer a home inspection.
• Ask all the workers who will be working at home to sign a written telecommuting agreement.
• Automate end-user security protocols, giving your IT department complete access to telecommuting computers in the network.
• Provide administrators with the ability to control and manage telecommuting computers from a virtual desktop, while granting personal computer users virtual access to their office desktop, while granting personal computer users virtual access to their office desktops.
• Prevent users from bypassing password protection in the event a laptop is lost or stolen.
• Extend password protection to other commonly used mobile devices such as USN flash drives or portable hard drives.

The Conclusion

The important thing to remember about managing employees who work from home or in global offices is that, at the end of the day, you are looking for the same things from them as you are from your in-office employees: productivities and reliability.

There is no two ways about it: the whole world is your office now – but without the right tools for the job, you will not be able to take advantage of this exciting new telecommunication environment.