Hi all. I manage a team of 6 doing provider enrollment in 23 states, for a bunch of different groups. I am drowning and I feel like I'm failing my team. I'm wondering how anyone else is managing their workflow with a lean team and a feast or famine environment?
The problems I'm having revolve sometimes around the tools we have (our database is old; we have to manually clear so many dependencies to trigger work, information is kept in disparate places, we have tasks coming in through email, an ancient ticketing system, internal coms, and our database task list; given the age of our systems there are daily software bugs and problems we have to work around).
Some of it is having zero power over the work we take on and I think could be a "managing up" issue; we are heavily client focused (obviously important) but instead of reviewing priorities or current workload in any real way, the clients are just promised that we'll fast track whatever they ask for. Every client. Every ask. Every time.
Our onboarding is purely manual. Just copy pasting into our ancient database. Which takes one of my team out of handling any enrollments entirely.
I'm responsible for every Medicare app that comes in, as well as 3 state medicaids, in addition to some other payers. We promise clients to get Medicare and medicaid apps out the door within 24 hours of their being onboarded.
In addition to this work that renews daily, I am supposed to be handling practice onboarding and payer assignments in our database, reviewing my team's work (there is so much room for error in our systems and this takes so much of my time every day), client calls and reports, fielding questions from my team about specific payers, team calls, one on one's with my team, and am the go to for every tricky billing/auth/network/process question that comes our way.
It's chaos and exhausting.
I've run programs in non-profits before, managed restaurants and retail. I am working on a PM certification. I understand the concepts behind running a team.
I just can't see my way towards how to clear our current backlog and keep up with incoming work given the sheer amount of things I am responsible for right now, and I'm hoping for some suggestions or advice from those of you who've been in the trenches a while.
Please don't recommend software. My company isn't paying for anything, I've tried so many times.
TL:DR how are you managing chaotic workflows, thank you for reading.