Is Quiet Quitting Affecting The Revenue Cycle in Healthcare?

“Quiet quitting” has been leading the workplace trend discussion for a while now, which should have revenue cycle leaders asking whether it’s an issue they should be concerned about. I haven’t seen any formal research on the revenue cycle specifically, but let’s look at a few facts. 

First off, Gallup reports that at least half of the U.S. workforce is “quiet quitting”, meaning that one out of every two workers in the country are doing the bare minimum to meet their job requirements. 

Second, they also found that the proportion of actively disengaged workers grew to 18% in 2022, with the ratio of engaged to actively disengaged employees the lowest in a decade. 

Third, revenue cycle jobs almost always require giving a bit more. Healthcare has been in a state of flux recently in adjusting to new pandemic codes, but updates such as OASIS-E and new CPT codes, and changes in EVV are always either around the corner or being implemented. Revenue cycle job descriptions are never static.  

Layer this with shortages in billers and coders and the need to understand increasingly complex medical billing solutions, and the question isn’t whether quiet quitting is a problem at your organization – it’s a question of how severe the problem is and how it should affect your planning in the future. If you’re seeing issues with performance, staff self-isolating from coworkers, withdrawal from unnecessary activities, and a lack of participation in meetings, you likely have a quiet quitting problem. 

But this is an opportunity. Revenue cycle leaders have a chance to build something new. 

It’s an opportunity to do better than some leaders who are encouraging their people to “just quit”. This will require rethinking what modern healthcare billers’ and coders’ jobs look like and what’s needed to build a healthier and more sustainable revenue cycle. Now is the time to talk to your teams about issues like burnout, how they experience training, what they feel is hampering their engagement, and what their career goals might be.

It’s also a time for being realistic. Leaders will need to simultaneously consider outsourcing some medical billing solutions and leaning more heavily on smarter use of technology to fill gaps. 

I think we’re headed into a new age of the healthcare worker experience, and that revenue cycle leaders have an opportunity to pave the way.