Certifications create opportunities at WVU Medicine

HFMA’s Enterprise membership provides organizations with the tools they need to advance their staff and improve performance. Leah Klinke, the assistant vice president of hospital revenue cycle at WVU Medicine in Morgantown, W.Va., and immediate past-president of the West Virginia Chapter, talks with HFMA about how her organization plans to use its Enterprise membership.

Q: Recently you’ve become an Enterprise member. Why did you select HFMA’s Enterprise membership?

A: I was really excited about the idea of Enterprise membership because I had wanted more of our staff-level and mid-level leadership to become members of HFMA and get the benefits of HFMA, but it’s always been a budgetary barrier.

We were also looking, at the time, at a partner to help standardize education, especially throughout the revenue cycle, and I was excited about Enterprise membership because I thought it accomplished both things. It could provide us the standardized education that we were looking for but also expand the membership of our staff.

Q: Tell us a little bit about career development and the role you think we can play.

A: We’re in a big transition right now as a system. We have been a system for some time, but very recently we’ve been trying to become more of a “system.” We’re growing pretty rapidly, so we’re trying to figure out how to create standardization in a lot of functions, but specifically revenue cycle.

When you standardize and you have a large number of people, you can create levels within each position. We wanted to standardize the levels for each different job title, so we created a grid of the different accomplishments that are required in order to progress to the next step.

One of the big components of that was earning a certification. We wanted to enable our employees to get certified. For HFMA, of course, for the CRCR certification, you need to be a member. So that also fed into our idea of wanting to get Enterprise membership.