Operations Coordinator, HB Coding, Full-time, Days (Remote - Must reside in IL, IN, IA, or WI - Sign-on bonus eligible)

📋 Description

• • Own the day-to-day operational rhythm of Northwestern Medicine’s Hospital & Professional (HB) Coding enterprise, ensuring 1,200+ daily encounters move seamlessly from registration to final bill drop while exceeding 97 % first-pass yield and < 3-day DNFB targets.
• • Serve as the air-traffic controller for a 300+ coder workforce spread across Illinois, Indiana, Iowa and Wisconsin—scheduling shifts, balancing queues, reallocating work in real-time and escalating high-risk accounts to specialty teams so no chart is left behind and every patient story is coded with precision.
• • Build and maintain Tableau & Epic dashboards that translate complex metrics into 30-second visual insights for directors, CDI, compliance and finance; your morning report drives staffing decisions that same afternoon and influences a $ 2 B net patient revenue stream.
• • Act as the primary liaison between Coding, Patient Access, HIM, CDI, Case Management and Revenue Integrity—hosting daily huddles, documenting action items and tracking issues to root-cause resolution so physicians experience one friction-free revenue cycle.
• • Coordinate multi-week onboarding for new coding hires and contractors: schedule Epic security sessions, assign e-learning paths, reserve virtual shadowing shifts and verify ROI within 90 days, cutting ramp-up time by 25 %.
• • Own the Epic HB Coding workqueue dictionary—adding new encounter types, updating hold rules and testing CPT/DRG edits before go-live so coders can trust their tools and focus on quality rather than work-arounds.
• • Monitor federal, state and payer policy alerts; translate changes into 24-hour cheat-sheets and lunch-and-learn decks that keep the team compliant with new ICD-10-CM, CPT and HCPCS guidelines and protect NM from costly denials.
• • Lead weekly denial-defect reviews—pulling 835 remit data, isolating top DRG/CPT rejections by payer and specialty, then partnering with quality auditors to implement coder coaching that recaptures $ 3 M+ annually.
• • Orchestrate quarterly coding roundtables with NM’s 10 hospitals, gathering coder feedback on system pain-points, creating JIRA tickets and shepherding IT sprints that reduce after-hours overtime by 18 % year-over-year.
• • Champion continuous-improvement events: map value streams, quantify waste, pilot robotic process automation for repetitive status checks and celebrate wins that free coders to concentrate on high-acuity cases.
• • Maintain the master staffing calendar—forecast volume spikes for flu season, academic calendars and new service lines, then pre-build contingency pools of contingent coders so productivity never dips below 95 %.
• • Coordinate vendor relationships for outsourced coding partners—negotiate SLA addenda, track weekly scorecards and enforce penalties, saving $ 400 k in avoidable fees last year alone.
• • Uphold NM’s “Patients First” culture by safeguarding data privacy (HIPAA) and fostering an inclusive remote environment where every coder feels heard, supported and empowered to grow.