Elissa First

Elissa has more than 12 years of healthcare consulting experience providing leadership and operational improvements to academic medical centers, large multifacility health systems, and physician medical groups across the country.

About Elissa

Elissa specializes in implementing innovative solutions to optimize revenue cycle operations, helping her clients manage and adapt to change and maintain sustainable results. In addition to her deep background in revenue cycle improvement, Elissa is a leader on Huron’s learning solutions team and assists clients with evaluating, designing and managing their learning programs.

Throughout her career, Elissa has:

• Helped clients implement their innovative strategy for delivering acute care in the home by delivering training for key clinical and operational roles.
• Directed the hospital billing and professional billing workstreams of a revenue cycle transformation engagement for a large academic medical center in the Southeast focused on process reengineering, business office redesign, developing an accountability structure and Epic optimization. The engagement drove more than $54 million in recurring hospital benefit, exceeding the high end of the benefit target by $10 million.
• Led systemwide initiatives as part of a revenue cycle engagement for a large public health system in the Northeast focused on standardizing and optimizing processes, technology and staffing for 11 acute facilities, generating over $100 million in recurring benefit.
• Overseen the teams responsible for a physician revenue cycle process improvement engagement focused on standardization, key performance indicator development and improvement, business office consolidation, and system conversion preparation in two regions of a national health system, resulting in more than $3.8 million in recurring benefit.
• Led targeted revenue cycle implementations for a cardiology division and the department of pediatrics of a large academic medical center faculty practice to improve process and cash flow alongside the standardization of revenue cycle processes and design across decentralized clinic sites and billing offices.