Revenue cycle can be where a hospital or health system’s margins are lost or won. But Austin Jones, senior vice president and CFO of North Kansas City, Mo.-based NKC Health, said his team focuses on four categories: culture, people, processes and technology.
Culture, Mr. Jones said, is a category that NKC Health has really “dug into.”
“You can have good people that want to do good work. You can have decent processes, and you can have the technology to support it, but I feel like the culture is what brings all of that together, and that culture is met with strong leadership,” Mr. Jones said during a Becker’s “CFO+Revenue Cycle Podcast” episode. “One of the areas we focused on is strategic leadership, not just the leadership that has the traditional background of being a biller or a collector, but a leader that understands how people are motivated, how teams are brought together around a common purpose, and also leaders that can think outside the box.”
Mr. Jones said NKC Health has made changes over the last year or two, with the independent system’s head of revenue cycle not coming from a traditional background.
“She’s also a CPA,” he said. “She started out in a CPA firm doing cost report type things and then reimbursement work, and then came in as my controller.”
Given NKC Health’s size, Mr. Jones said the system does not have the bandwidth to narrowly hire for each function, with leaders often wearing multiple hats. Instead, he looks inward to match people with roles that fit their skill sets, strengths and abilities.
The theme in NKC Health’s culture? Leaning into everyone’s strengths.
“We can’t try to work around or manage around weaknesses because they’re always going to be there,” he said. “But if we lean into people’s strengths and pull them out of maybe a role that is too heavily weighted on their weakness and push them into something that they’re going to be able to lean into their strengths, we’ve found a lot of success with that.”
NKC Health’s revenue cycle has also strengthened collaboration with departments like IT, managed care and health information management. The system has also placed more focus on education and training, incorporating a monthly education platform for employees.
Lastly, technology partnerships are another piece of NKC Health’s strategy. The system was the second client to go live with Oracle Health’s Cerner.
“There’s a lot of buzz right now with AI, with these scaled up technology platforms,” Mr. Jones said. “We don’t have maybe some of the internal built-ins with maybe an Epic shop. So we’ve really had to look at partnerships, and that’s actually one of our bigger challenges is vetting those partnerships, understanding who’s great at sales but not great at delivering, and who actually can deliver on a product that’ll help us to achieve efficiencies.”
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