Scaling up revenue cycle BPO operations – Lessons from our experience

Faced with the daunting task of deploying over 1,000 people with healthcare industry knowledge and experience, Access Healthcare’s recruitment, training, and operations team had to think differently. The team had to react fast and develop multi-pronged approach including leadership participation in the hiring program, utilization of automation tools for hiring, selection and training, creating a lucrative referral program, and strong brand messages. We bring you lessons from our experience of building a 1000 people operation in less than two months in a completely new city.

1. DRAW UP AN EFFECTIVE SOURCING STRATEGY

An effective talent sourcing strategy must necessarily consider the complexity of the process, time to train resources, the pace mandated by the customer to transition the process, and quality service levels committed to the customer. To achieve a seamless transition, the sourcing, operations, and training teams need to collaborate. Involving stakeholders from the customer’s side, wherever possible, will ensure a greater appreciation of the risks and challenges as you strive to migrate a large-scale process.

2. HIRE AND DEPLOY THE RIGHT SET OF LEADERS

As we were embarking on setting up a new center in a completely new city, finding the right set of leaders was of utmost importance, and, even more important, was to hire these leaders ahead of the schedule. Hiring and deploying the local leadership team early on can accelerate souring efforts. Given a short timeline to hire and ramp-up the team, we had just 15-day time to ensure that these leaders were inducted and aligned to the organizational objective of a quick pace hiring.

Winning the Trust: The recruiters oriented the initial seed team hired during the first week, about Access Healthcare - our culture, service offerings, growth strategy, achievements, and people programs. All these factors helped in turning them into brand ambassadors for Access Healthcare in the new city

3. GET THE WORD OUT - SOCIAL MEDIA AND PERSONAL OUTREACH

Often, your best bet is to involve your leaders to accelerate hiring processes. Being an unknown brand in the city with an office infrastructure that was still being built out, the authenticity of the new employer will get questioned. To address this band gap, we involved the newly hired leaders to accelerate our brand messaging, set up a call center to reach out to identified candidates, initiated a social media reach out effort, and circulated organizational collateral. With consistent messaging on available job opportunities, history and pedigree of the promoters of the company, questions from prospective employees were addressed. 

Unified communication that includes web and social updates, text messaging along with in-person and word of mouth communication via the leaders on-boarded early in the cycle, can help amplify the impact of your hiring message.

4. AMPLIFY YOUR PEOPLE BRAND THROUGH A STRONG REFERRAL PROGRAM

Job portals are seldom as effective as “word of mouth” or social outreach. A quick decision on lucrative referral bonuses ensured that the leaders and revenue cycle specialists being on-boarded into the company spread the word about the organization and growth opportunities. Nothing works as effectively as an aligned team when you are looking to onboard resources quickly.

Refer and Win Application. Differentiated social hiring strategy leveraging our Refer and Win App on the company’s Facebook page enabled our followers to participate in the referral program as well. All successful referrals were rewarded quickly. Further, we utilized location-specific advertising on Facebook to mobilize job candidates as well as those interested in referring people to work for Access Healthcare.

5. SUPPORT YOUR FRONT-LINE RECRUITERS WITH A BACK-END REACH OUT TEAM

Revenue cycle specialists are hard to find. When you are looking to hire top-notch talent, it is imperative that you can address their queries about your organization and growth opportunities that you offer. We supplemented our front-end hiring team’s reach out efforts with a back-end call center and processing team to address questions from candidates and handle the administrative work of generating e-offer letters.

6. ENSURE QUALITY THROUGH AN AUTOMATED TESTING AND SELECTION PROCESS

As a BPO organization, Access Healthcare often hires 100's of candidates in a month - with a yield rate of less 10%. Hence, we had to create an automated engine that enabled effective testing of the aptitude, skills, and revenue cycle knowledge of prospective employees. arc.recruit, Access Healthcare’s proprietary technology includes functionality to screen resumes, schedule interviews, promote our employee referral programs, facilitate testing and selection processes, generate e-offer letters, and coordinate with the on-boarding teams. With over 850 employees to be hired within 30 days, managing the entire recruitment life cycle of identification, testing and selection could have been a daunting task. However, arc.recruit enabled us to streamline the entire recruitment life cycle and support our growth agenda.

7. SUPPORT YOUR SOURCING TEAM WITH EXECUTIVE PRESENCE AND LUCRATIVE INCENTIVES

When managing a high-volume hiring program, it is imperative that the sourcing team does not drop the ball at any time during the sourcing cycle. Outreach efforts often run into extended hours as the candidates are more likely to pick calls after office hours. Therefore, a good incentive program can boost the morale of your sourcing team and help you achieve your business goals. Our sourcing team observed low results in the first week and could have easily given up. Active participation in the sourcing efforts by Access Healthcare’s leadership team, combined with the reach out efforts of the local leaders on-boarded early in the cycle ensured significantly better results from the second week and kept the morale high.

8. RECOGNIZE THAT OFFSHORE REVENUE CYCLE TRAINING IS SPECIALIZED

Large-scale hiring programs also necessitate a re-look at your training programs. On one hand, you may be hiring individuals with revenue cycle processing experience, on another hand, you may also have individuals without experience. Different approaches are needed for people with and without experience. While experienced candidates need to be assessed for their familiarity with the processes being transitioned, inexperienced candidates need to go through a more detailed training program. Process transition leaders need to bear in mind that the ramp-up of experience resources will be faster than the inexperience resources. Modularized training programs can provide transition managers the flexibility to balance productivity goals with the pace of ramp-up. In exigent situations, some of the modules could potentially be staggered over the initial weeks to allow production processes to commence earlier.

9. GRADUALLY IMPROVE QUALITY AND PRODUCTIVITY TARGETS

New hires deployed on a customer’s revenue cycle processes usually take as many as three months to achieve full productivity level. While hiring experienced candidates can potentially shrink the dramatically, you may not be lucky enough to find them. As you strive to achieve the service levels committed to customers, a graduated reduction of quality samples being checked for new hires from 100% to 20% over three months has proven to be an effective strategy. Also, the production targets for the new hires also need to be gradually increased. As the team ramps-up, team leaders and process trainers need to analyze the errors committed by the new team and provide right interventions to improve overall process knowledge.

10. GET EXECUTIVE BUY-IN

A large-scale hiring program can only be successful when there is a demonstrated involvement of senior executives of the organization. This enables quicker decision making on the design of the sourcing programs, incentive structures for referral program and the sourcing team, besides enabling them to effectively communicate the risks and challenges to customers, and, if needed, realign customer expectations.

OUR STORY - BY THE NUMBERS,

About the Authors

• Magesh M, Director - Human Resources - Talent Acquisition, has over a decade of experience in recruitment processes including alignment of sourcing strategy with business goals, strategic planning & implementation, the design of recruitment processes, managing sourcing teams and process automation. He can be reached at magesh.m1@accesshealthcare.co 
• Yoganandan R, Lead Director - is an accomplished operations leader with experience in revenue cycle business process services delivery, process migration, quality and compliance, and managing customer relationships. His core areas of specialization include account management, service delivery, and operations excellence. He can be reached at yoganandan.r@accesshealthcare.co

About Access Healthcare

Access Healthcare provides business process outsourcing, applications services, and robotic process automation tools to healthcare providers, payers, and related service providers. We operate from 12 delivery centers across US, India and the Philippines. Our 8,000+ staff is committed to bringing revenue cycle excellence to our customers by leveraging technology, emerging best practices, and global delivery. Based in Dallas, we support over 150,000 physicians, serve 80+ specialties, process over $ 50 billion of A/R annually, and ascribe medical codes to over 10 million charts annually. To learn how Access Healthcare can help your organization boost its financial performance, visit accesshealthcare.org.