Almost every week since June 2019, a member of the provider account management team at Change Healthcare has obtained HFMA’s Certified Revenue Cycle Representative (CRCR) certification. As a result, 77% of staff who work with payer and provider clients on revenue cycle and consumer payments solutions and related areas now have the CRCR designation — a high attainment among HFMA member companies.
This extraordinary accomplishment was made possible through the organization’s Enterprise Membership in HFMA. Moira Kelly, senior vice president, provider account management, emphasized that one of the primary objectives for Change Healthcare in joining HFMA as an Enterprise Business Partner was to ensure its representatives would possess a deep knowledge and expertise. of healthcare’s revenue cycle business.
“One of the core tenants in building this organization was to be able to give customers as much value as possible,” Kelly said. “And early on, those customers would say, ‘We want to know how we can improve our performance. We need someone who has a thorough, working understanding of our business and our challenges.’ The CRCR credential is a way to demonstrate that.”
Those conversations underscored for her organization the importance and value of the CRCR credential for her organization’s staff, Kelly said.
“We can see that those people are making a difference with these customers, because they know the business problems, the routines and even the lingo,” she said. “No one’s walking into some of our customers’ [offices] and saying, ‘I don’t understand what you do; I don’t understand your workflow.’ [Our staff] get that understanding from going through this process with HFMA, and it just makes them even more valuable to customers.”
Another extraordinary aspect of Change Healthcare’s accomplishment is that the staff members’ pursuit of the CRCR certification was voluntary.
“We opted not to force it,” Kelly said. “We opted only to encourage it. Then, we highlighted those folks who achieved it, the wins they had with their customers and their ability to join HFMA boards and become more active in their local chapters.”
Change Healthcare uses Salesforces’ Chatter corporate social media tool to communicate successes, said Eugene Beretsky, CRCR, account management optimization advisor and a primary sponsor for the initiative.
“Whenever someone obtains the certification, I post it on Chatter for everyone to see,” Beretsky said. “We give them the kudos they deserve and we all celebrate that. That’s motivated others to get involved.”
He also said peer influence plays a role: “As the early adopters have successes, that’s also inspiring others to follow suit.”
Kelly concluded: “By leveraging the HFMA tools to build infrastructure around the solution, we are increasing our value to customers. They know they are getting people who can hit the ground running with them when they have questions, if they run into a business problem, or if they just want to push their teams to that next level. This is more important now than ever before, as our customers confront the COVID-19 pandemic and need skilled partners who can help them manage the patient volume, manage revenue stability and help them plan for revenue recovery after this extraordinary crisis is behind us.”
