[Hiring] Strategic Services Associate @Duke Careers

Role Description

At Duke Health, we're driven by a commitment to compassionate care that changes the lives of patients, their loved ones, and the greater community. No matter where your talents lie, join us and discover how we can advance health together.

Pursue your passion for caring with the Patient Revenue Management Organization, which is the fully integrated, centralized revenue cycle organization that supports the entire health system in streamlining the revenue cycle. This includes scheduling, registration, coding, billing, and other essential revenue functions for Duke Health.

Duties and Responsibilities of this Level

• Data Analysis & Business Intelligence
  • Perform quantitative and qualitative analyses to support strategic, operational, clinical, and financial decision-making.
  • Develop recurring and ad hoc analyses using internal data sources and external benchmarking resources.
  • Conduct Vizient data pulls and analysis, including benchmarking, utilization, cost, quality, clinical, and operational data as appropriate.
  • Clean, validate, reconcile, and manipulate large datasets to ensure analytical accuracy.
  • Identify trends, outliers, performance gaps, and improvement opportunities.
  • Develop dashboards, reports, scorecards, and executive-ready presentations that translate complex data into clear business insights.
  • Partner with Finance, Decision Support, Clinical Analytics, and other data teams to validate financial and operational results.
  • Establish baseline performance metrics and develop methodologies to measure the impact of improvement initiatives.
  • Support business cases, opportunity assessments, forecasting, and return-on-investment analyses.
• Project Management
  • Serve as project manager or project-management support for strategic and operational improvement initiatives.
  • Develop project charters, workplans, timelines, milestones, and deliverables.
  • Coordinate cross-functional meetings, working sessions, and project teams.
  • Maintain project trackers, action logs, risk/issue logs, and status reporting.
  • Identify project risks, barriers, and dependencies and escalate issues appropriately.
  • Hold project stakeholders accountable for deliverables and timelines.
  • Prepare concise project updates for leadership, including progress against goals, financial impact, key risks, and next steps.
  • Support implementation planning and ensure projects move from analysis and recommendation through execution and sustainment.
• Physician Documentation Initiatives
  • Support initiatives designed to improve the completeness, accuracy, and specificity of physician documentation.
  • Analyze clinical and financial data to identify documentation opportunities and prioritize areas for intervention.
  • Partner with physicians, Clinical Documentation Integrity (CDI), Health Information Management (HIM), Coding, Revenue Cycle, and clinical leadership.
  • Develop physician-specific or service-line-specific analyses to identify documentation trends and opportunities.
  • Assist in creating physician education materials, performance reports, and feedback tools.
  • Track documentation improvement initiatives and quantify associated financial, quality, coding, and operational impacts.
  • Monitor results over time and help develop processes to sustain improvements.
• Margin Improvement Initiatives
  • Support enterprise and service-line margin improvement initiatives through data-driven opportunity identification and project execution.
  • Analyze revenue, expense, utilization, productivity, supply cost, labor, reimbursement, and other financial/operational drivers.
  • Partner with Finance and operational leaders to identify root causes of unfavorable performance.
  • Quantify potential savings, revenue opportunities, and financial impact associated with improvement opportunities.
  • Develop initiative-level tracking to monitor expected versus realized financial benefits.
  • Support initiatives related to labor productivity, supply utilization, purchased services, revenue optimization, clinical variation, throughput, capacity utilization, and other margin drivers.
  • Help operational leaders translate analytical findings into practical improvement actions.
  • Monitor and report results following implementation to ensure benefits are realized and sustained.
• Strategic Planning & Executive Support
  • Conduct research and analysis supporting strategic planning, market assessments, service-line planning, and organizational priorities.
  • Prepare executive presentations, briefing materials, dashboards, and decision-support analyses.
  • Support leadership with rapid-turnaround analyses and special projects.
  • Synthesize information from multiple sources into clear recommendations and courses of action.
  • Maintain a strong understanding of organizational strategy, financial performance, operational priorities, and key performance indicators.

Qualifications

• Bachelors degree in a business or health-related field is required.
• Minimum of 5 years work experience, including 3 years of experience with significant responsibility for performance/process improvement.
• Experience leading work teams required.
• Experience can be supplemented with a Master's degree, with a Master's being equivalent to two years of experience.
• Coding experience is highly preferred - preferable inpatient. Clinical experience is preferred.
• RHIT/RHIA/CCS certification is preferred.

Requirements

• Effective written and verbal communication skills.
• Ability to communicate with customers/staff with diverse educational backgrounds.
• Analysis of data and processes for opportunities for improvement.
• Ability to manage numerous diverse projects simultaneously through effective priority setting, efficient use of time, and organization.
• Knowledge of accreditation standards and regulations related to health care.
• Attention to detail and accuracy.
• Computer literacy.

Benefits

• Quality of Life: Living in the Triangle!
• Relocation Assistance (based on eligibility).
• REMOTE POSITION: Monday - Friday (First Shift).