Associate Director, Billing Strategy - Denials & Appeals

This position is listed on behalf of a partner company, who manages all applications and next steps. Our partner is looking for a Associate Director, Billing Strategy - Denials & Appeals based in United States. This is a senior individual contributor role responsible for shaping denial management and appeals strategy across a complex healthcare revenue cycle environment. The position combines operational leadership, payer advocacy, data analysis, and technology enablement to improve reimbursement outcomes. You will investigate denial trends, identify root causes, strengthen appeal performance, and develop strategies to prevent avoidable revenue leakage. The role also serves as a bridge between revenue cycle operations and technology teams, translating business requirements into scalable system logic and automation opportunities. You will partner with outsourced RCM teams, engineering teams, vendors, and internal stakeholders to improve workflows and accountability. Success requires deep knowledge of laboratory billing, payer policies, medical necessity, and reimbursement methodologies, together with a strong analytical mindset. This opportunity is ideal for an experienced RCM leader who enjoys solving complex problems, influencing cross-functional teams, and building more efficient, technology-enabled revenue processes. Accountabilities: - Lead the overall denial management and appeals strategy across commercial, Medicare, Medicaid, managed care, and other payer environments, establishing performance expectations and improvement priorities. - Define and monitor key performance indicators including appeal overturn rates, appeal timelines, recovery performance, denial rates, and financial impact. - Serve as a subject matter expert on payer policies, medical necessity criteria, laboratory testing reimbursement, and the requirements needed to build compelling appeals.

- Interpret payer policies and guide internal and outsourced teams in developing effective strategies for defending medical necessity and resolving complex denials. - Analyze payer behavior and denial patterns to identify systemic issues, inform payer advocacy efforts, and support contracting and escalation strategies. - Partner with eligibility, prior authorization, coding, billing, and other revenue cycle functions to identify upstream issues and proactively reduce preventable denials. - Oversee and evaluate outsourced RCM and BPO performance, using data to identify workflow gaps, enforce accountability, and drive measurable improvements. - Develop standardized workflows, job aids, and operating practices that improve consistency, quality, efficiency, and results across denial and appeal activities. - Translate denial and appeals processes into system requirements and logic, partnering with engineering teams and vendors to support billing system enhancements and automation. - Define requirements for rules-based workflows, denial routing, appeal triggers, and other capabilities within billing platforms and related systems. - Provide domain expertise for automation initiatives involving rules engines, RPA, AI-enabled workflows, intelligent routing, and decisioning. - Lead user acceptance testing and quality assurance for system changes, validating that automated outputs reflect payer policies and real-world denial scenarios. - Identify manual processes that can be transitioned to scalable, low-touch, or unattended workflows while proactively identifying edge cases, failure points, and gaps in automation logic. - Use analytical tools such as Power BI, SQL, Excel, and Snowflake to quantify denial drivers, identify trends, evaluate financial impact, and support data-driven decision-making. - Influence cross-functional stakeholders across operations, engineering, vendors, and leadership without relying on direct reporting authority.