Health Insurance Billing Manager – Your First 90 Days on the Job

You’ve landed a new job as a billing manager for a health insurance company. Hooray! As you celebrate in your new role, you realize you need to prepare. What you do in your first 90 days on the job can play a big role in your long-term success.

With that in mind, here are six tips for a health insurance billing manager’s first 90 days on the job:

Create a Short-term Plan

On or before Day 1, create a short-term plan that helps you clarify your priorities, set goals, and determine how you’ll measure your short-term success. Many new hires find it easy to break down those priorities and goals into 30, 60, and 90-day chunks. That plan will likely include some of the following activities.

Build Relationships

One of the keys to success in any organization — especially large, complex organizations typically found in the health insurance industry — is your ability to build relationships that help you propel projects forward. Especially if you’re new to the organization, it’s essential to build those relationships early. How do you build relationships?

  • Volunteer to do work — The idea of reciprocity is as old as time. If you do something nice for someone, the odds of them reciprocating by helping you increase. So don’t be afraid to volunteer to perform work that you may not normally do. It can help you build relationships, relationships that you can likely leverage in the future to move your priorities forward.
  • Work across the organization — Many new hires focus on their management or higher-level teammates. But you need to build relationships across the organization. As a health insurance billing manager, you’ll likely need to interact with the technology team, the enrollment team, the member services team, and more. So work up, down, and across your organization to build relationships.
  • Do what you say you’ll do — Good relationships are based on trust. If you follow through on your commitments on time and in a quality manner you’ll gain trust.
  • Keep a smile on your face — Nobody likes a Debbie downer and positivity can be contagious. Negative behavior may play well in anonymity on social media platforms, but it doesn’t help you build relationships in person.

Assess Your Team

Whether this is your first time managing staff or you have decades of management experience, you likely know that the makeup of your team can determine how successful you are as a manager. Take time to assess your team’s skills. Understand their strengths and weaknesses and determine how to improve those weaknesses. It’s also important to understand that one size does not fit all. What motivates one employee does not motivate another. By better understanding each of your employees – their skills, their motivations, their work styles — you’ll be better able to manage and motivate each of your employees.

Assess Your Process

If you’re new to the organization or team, you must review your billing processes. The average tenure at a health insurance company is high. That means processes may have been created years ago and not reviewed or modernized because there wasn’t a fresh set of eyes to find inefficiencies.

A great way to achieve several aims — building relationships and assessing your team — is to convene meetings to analyze and map processes. It will give you a good idea of what your team does. Plus, it helps everyone discover potential process improvements.

Assess Your Technology

Once you’ve assessed your process, it’s time to assess your technology. Many insurers use antiquated legacy or core admin systems or underperforming core admin billing modules. These solutions lead to a lot of manual premium billing processes. If you find your team spending a large amount of their time on manual reconciliation, you’re managing data and mail merges to send delinquency letters, or your member services team is inundated with billing-related calls, you could likely use a better health insurance premium billing platform. New health insurance premium billing software can reduce a lot of manual processes while improving billing accuracy. In general, solutions built specifically for health insurance premium billing are going to be better than less focused solutions included in a core admin feature bundle.

If you’re looking for solutions and are considering how to differentiate solutions, you can review our insurance billing and payments RFP here.

Prioritize a Long-term Plan

Once you’ve had time to assess the team, processes, and technology, it’s time to put together a long-term plan that addresses your findings. That may mean you need to reshuffle your team members and their duties, adjust management tactics and strategies or start implementing process improvement suggestions. Perhaps you’ve decided that you need a technology investment. Whatever the case, start building a plan that you can take to your manager. That plan should include key activities as well as the business benefit and a rough timeline for implementing those changes. Don’t forget that communication is the key to success. Communicate early and often with your team, your manager, and other affected individuals and teams.

Certifi’s health insurance premium billing and payment solutions help healthcare payers improve member satisfaction while reducing administrative costs.

Download a Guide to Premium Billing Software for Health Insurers

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