Roughly 10 years ago, Sunrita Dasgupta took a “leap of faith” and moved from her home in Bangalore, India to California. She had a law degree from the University of Pune, one of India’s premier institutions, but decided to try her hand at something else in the states – technology. She proved a quick study.
A few years after gaining experience at smaller firms, she got her big break when she was hired to manage the coding and development teams at McKesson. She took on a new challenge when she moved to Simplee and started working as an engagement manager. It was here she learned the art of bridging the needs of the client with the skills and work of the engineering team.
“That gave me so much technical insight into how processes can be laid out,” she said.
Dasgupta carries all of that expertise with her as the director of Flywire’s healthcare implementation team. Her experience on both the technical and business sides of healthcare give her a unique mix of project management skills. She’s a big part of the reason clients often say Flywire – in the complex world of healthcare systems management – is one of the easiest implementations they’ve ever done.
Dasgupta shared some of the secrets of successful revenue cycle management technology implementations – which can make or break enterprise technology projects. Many of these tips can be applied outside of these specific projects – and point to the importance of factoring in the implementation process into purchasing decisions.
An implementation team that understands the product, and a development team that understands the client. The implementation team needs a really good understanding of how the product works. They need to have regular conversations with the product managers and developers and understand the entire working mechanisms. This helps navigate through the requirements of the client. “It gives me better leverage in understanding multiple questions. This is what I want, this is the end result. This is how they achieve it in terms of the coding process,” she said.
On the flip side, the engineering team should have a really good idea of the “why” behind the client’s needs. “I think we do a good job at Flywire of making sure that the development team understands the business case and the bigger picture,” she said.
A leader who knows her team’s strengths. Dasgupta can handle many of the tasks that take a project from start to finish herself, but is big on delegating where people have strengths, and leveraging many different skill sets to make things shine. “I love being a people manager. There’s a special kind of satisfaction or happiness that I get out of mentoring people, coaching them, and being at a place where I provide them direction now. It makes me much more efficient than trying to execute everything alone. I love to teach what I know. I’m very passionate about it.”
Make sure implementation team members have revenue cycle backgrounds. Implementation managers should have a revenue cycle background, and really understand the scope of work with the clients.
Look for standardized methodology. Flywire has a pre-built integration to support all Cerner clients – with a certified data extraction module – which has simplified development and implementation. It has a standardized implementation process for Epic customers – an iterative process – improved by best practices and learning with every new implementation.
For her own people, Dasgupta developed internal naming conventions to make it easier to implement Flywire’s different packages of products, concepts easily grasped by the growing team. She and her team developed weekly task lists for implementation managers, and made it clear what was standard and out-of-the-box, and what wasn’t. The weekly tasks list covers what information to ask for from the client at what point in the project – for instance, when does Flywire need the bank information? Projects are broken into milestones and workstreams.
But also redundancy. A backup implementation manager is assigned to the lead implementation manager on the project – to support and seamlessly step in if the project lead needs to step in and lead for any reason at all, a suggestion made on an employee engagement survey. There’s an added benefit to the understudy – they learn, get access to a mentor and develop new skills.