Kelly Ellis may have only been with Revenue Cycle Coding Strategies for 3 short years, but they have been absolutely power-packed years. Growing Coding+ at RCCS in the middle of a pandemic has been no easy feat, and it is thanks to her more than 20 years in the industry as a coder, manager, and educator that she has been able to thrive amid the chaos and rise to the occasion.
As the Executive Director of Healthcare Consulting, Coding+, and Compliance, Kelly has been proud to lead her team to success and work directly with clients. It’s exciting for her to guide growth potential at RCCS and help those under her supervision continue to make progress along with the company.
As Kelly sees it, when we all win, RCCS wins, and when RCCS wins, we all win. It is this collaborative and collective spirit of striving and thriving that she has found genuinely endearing about our relatively small firm.
Of the various consulting companies Kelly has worked with over the years, she notes that RCCS has stood out to her as special because of the many opportunities she has here to contribute her expertise and build on her professional experience while also helping the company and other employees grow. She also loves being able to contribute to a spectacular corporate culture rich in diversity and inclusivity, both within the company and among her clients.
Coding+ offers staffing solutions as an extension of hospitals and physician offices, and groups billing departments. It provides augmentation, full outsourcing, and even coding audits for these healthcare facilities. And Kelly oversees it all, ensuring the coders at RCCS are performing as expected, the clients are educated and informed, and compliance is always top of mind.
While RCCS has many goals, Kelly’s largest focus within the company is to help the Coding+ program develop seamlessly. She spends her days working directly with clients, providing target-focused messaging to the client development team, and reaching out to past clients to bring them back into the fold.
She truly has mastered the art of functioning with both warmth and wisdom at the intersection of technology and client service. It is not an easy balance to maintain, but Kelly manages it all with grace and professionalism.
Kelly recently also became the head of compliance for RCCS, which places full accountability firmly on her shoulders, and while she takes her responsibility with the respect it deserves, she is also thrilled to fill such an important role in a company she admires so much.
As she says, “I like that RCCS is a smaller boutique company. You don’t get lost in the shuffle of a big company and there’s so much room for personal and professional growth. I also like that we’re keeping everything stateside and not outsourcing out of the country.”
Long before she joined us, Kelly studied Health Information Systems and Health Information Management at the University of Cincinnati in Ohio. Since graduating, she has picked up a number of certifications, including her RHIA, her CDIP, her CCS, and her CCS-P.
She is driven to excellence and to exceed even her own expectations, so when she gets the chance to learn more and integrate it into her career, she takes it!
For this reason, she has remained diligent in her maintenance of related affiliations, including one with American Health Information Management Association and one with the Ohio Health Information Management Association.
She has even contributed to the wider bank of knowledge in our industry through her publication of the article, “The Challenges of Corporate Compliance,” for Record Magazine in April of 2014.
At work, Kelly devotes her professional life to fully understanding both the clinical atmosphere from inside of the hospital and the operational aspects from the outside as a consultant. In doing so, she is able to contribute to the shaping of better environments for all the players involved – doctors, patients, and everyone in between.
She takes great pride in being a servant leader; service is at the heart of everything she does, and she is able to see clearly how her work makes a difference in the everyday lives of regular people.
Kelly has built a reputation as someone who shares her expertise, encourages leadership in her team, and promotes from within, bettering the industries and her employees along the way.
The fact that RCCS allows for remote work is a huge part of the company culture that Kelly appreciates so much. She is based in Turlock, California, and loves that she can enjoy her personal time and travel, while also remaining dedicated to a career she cares deeply about. While some may struggle to successfully collaborate and lead in the remote work landscape, Kelly absolutely thrives in it.
Thanks to RCCS’ strong belief in work-life balance and accommodating a fully remote workforce, Kelly is able to enjoy her free time with her many hobbies, like making stained glass from scratch and traveling. Kelly has traveled to more than 15 countries. Her current favorites include Ireland and Scotland, and she looks forward to upcoming trips to Iceland and countries in Asia like Thailand and Cambodia.