Manager of Workforce Management, Patient Access

The Manager of Workforce Management, Patient Access Engagement Center leads the strategic workforce, capacity, real-time performance, analytics, and automation planning functions supporting the Patient Access Engagement Center. This role owns long-, medium-, and short-range forecasting; staffing and capacity modeling; scheduling; real-time management; workforce performance reporting; and workforce contingency planning across voice, digital, and applicable back-office Patient Access work. The Manager also leads the operational strategy, capacity planning, prioritization, performance measurement, and optimization of RPA and AI-enabled workflows in partnership with Digital, IT, Information Security, Compliance, Finance, and Patient Access leadership. The Manager integrates human and digital capacity into a unified workforce strategy designed to achieve service, productivity, financial, employee, and patient-experience goals.

Key Responsibilities

Strategic Workforce & Capacity Planning

• Develop annual and multi-year workforce strategies aligned with Patient Access growth, service expectations, organizational expansion, digital adoption, financial objectives, and anticipated changes in demand.
• Build scenario-based capacity models evaluating changes in volume, productivity, service levels, hours of operation, technology, automation, attrition, shrinkage, skill mix, and organizational growth.
• Provide data-driven recommendations regarding when to hire, cross-train, redeploy, flex, outsource, automate, or eliminate avoidable demand.
• Develop capacity plans that integrate human labor, digital self-service, AI, RPA, and other automation into a unified workforce strategy.
• Partner with Finance to develop annual labor budgets, productivity assumptions, staffing targets, overtime plans, and workforce-related financial forecasts.
• Quantify the operational and financial impact of proposed staffing, scheduling, technology, and automation investments.

Forecasting, Demand Management & Omnichannel Planning

• Own long-, medium-, and short-term volume and workload forecasting across voice, chat, messaging, email, digital interactions, and applicable Patient Access back-office functions.
• Establish forecast-accuracy standards by interval, day, week, and month; analyze forecast variance and implement corrective actions when performance falls outside established thresholds.
• Continuously refine forecasting methodology using historical trends, seasonality, organizational growth, marketing or clinical initiatives, payer changes, technology deployments, and other business drivers.
• Analyze contact drivers, repeat contacts, transfers, failure demand, and channel utilization to identify opportunities to reduce unnecessary demand, improve first-contact resolution, and migrate appropriate interactions to digital self-service.
• Partner with Operations, Training/Quality, Digital, and other stakeholders to anticipate demand changes resulting from new workflows, service lines, acquisitions, system changes, and patient engagement initiatives.
• Develop integrated demand and capacity views that enable leadership to understand total Patient Access workload rather than evaluating individual channels or functions in isolation.

Scheduling, Workforce Flexibility & Optimization

• Own schedule creation and optimization, including shift design, PTO and time-off planning, shift-bid/trade processes, alternative work schedules, and staffing patterns aligned with forecasted demand.
• Develop flexible staffing strategies using cross-skilling, skill-based routing, voluntary overtime, voluntary time off, flex staffing, and other mechanisms to better align labor supply with demand.
• Establish and manage shrinkage assumptions and targets, including PTO, absenteeism, training, coaching, meetings, system downtime, and other productive and nonproductive activities.
• Monitor schedule efficiency, staffing variance, adherence, conformance, occupancy, overtime, utilization, and productivity; partner with Operations leaders to address material trends.
• Maintain and administer the workforce management platform, including configuration, data integrity, workforce rules, reporting, and integration with the contact center platform.
• Partner with Training leadership to incorporate onboarding, continuing education, coaching, and development requirements into capacity and schedule planning.

Real-Time Performance & Engagement Center Command Center

• Lead real-time management of Engagement Center queues and workloads, including intraday staffing adjustments, break and lunch optimization, queue balancing, skill changes, and redeployment of available capacity.
• Establish a formal real-time command-center model with defined service-level thresholds, escalation protocols, ownership, and recovery actions.
• Develop and maintain a WFM escalation matrix defining when service or capacity risks escalate from Real-Time Analysts to operational and executive leadership.
• Coordinate intraday response to unexpected volume spikes, staffing shortages, technology outages, automation failures, severe weather, and other events that threaten service delivery.
• Develop intraday recovery plans and provide timely, actionable communication to Operations leaders regarding service-level risk and recommended interventions.
• Partner with Operations leadership on associate-level adherence and conformance trends while maintaining clear accountability between WFM measurement and operational performance management.

Reporting, Analytics & Financial Performance

• Own the Engagement Center workforce and capacity scorecard, including forecast accuracy, staffing variance, schedule efficiency, adherence, conformance, occupancy, shrinkage, overtime, service level, average speed of answer, abandonment, average handle time, productivity, backlog/aging, and other relevant measures.
• Develop reporting that measures WFM effectiveness separately from overall operational performance and clearly identifies root causes of performance variance.
• Deliver regular workforce insights, risks, scenarios, and recommendations to Patient Access, Revenue Cycle, Finance, and executive leadership.
• Develop cost-to-serve, labor-cost-per-contact or transaction, productivity, overtime, and budget-variance reporting to support financial stewardship.
• Partner with the Director of Training and Quality Management to connect workforce, quality, patient-experience, and performance data to training and coaching priorities.
• Use analytics to identify opportunities to improve staffing efficiency, reduce avoidable labor expense, increase workforce flexibility, and improve the patient and associate experience.

RPA, AI & Digital Workforce Strategy

• Lead the operational strategy, capacity planning, prioritization, performance measurement, and optimization of RPA and AI-enabled workflows within Patient Access, in partnership with Digital, IT, Information Security, Compliance, Finance, and other appropriate governance functions.
• Identify, prioritize, and scope automation opportunities based on volume, complexity, patient impact, financial value, workforce capacity, risk, and readiness.
• Treat digital workers as measurable capacity within the overall workforce model and incorporate automation throughput and availability into staffing and capacity plans.
• Establish and monitor digital-workforce performance standards, including automation availability/uptime, success rate, exception rate, throughput, productivity, capacity released, failure trends, and financial return.
• Partner with technical resources on break/fix support, enhancements, testing, change control, monitoring, and production documentation while maintaining clear ownership for technical architecture and enterprise governance.
• Evaluate and pilot emerging AI capabilities such as virtual agents, agent assist, conversation intelligence, and workflow automation for appropriate use within the Engagement Center.
• Measure realized benefits following automation implementation, including labor capacity released, demand reduced, cycle-time improvement, quality improvement, patient-experience impact, and ROI.
• Ensure automation failures and downtime are incorporated into contingency staffing and recovery plans.

Business Continuity & Workforce Resilience

• Develop and maintain workforce contingency and recovery plans for technology outages, automation failures, unexpected demand, severe weather, staffing disruptions, facility issues, and other events that threaten service delivery.
• Model the human capacity required to absorb work when digital systems, self-service channels, or automation are unavailable.
• Define minimum staffing, critical-skill, and recovery requirements for priority Patient Access functions.
• Partner with Operations, IT, Digital, and organizational emergency-management resources on downtime exercises, business-continuity testing, and post-event reviews.
• Use lessons learned from disruptions to improve staffing models, escalation processes, cross-training, technology resilience, and recovery procedures.

Leadership & Team Management

• Lead and develop a high-performing team of workforce management analysts, schedulers, real-time analysts, and RPA/automation resources.
• Set team priorities, goals, service standards, and performance expectations; provide coaching, succession planning, and professional development.
• Establish clear roles and decision rights across forecasting, scheduling, real-time management, analytics, and automation support.
• Serve as the Engagement Center's primary leader for workforce, capacity, real-time performance, and digital-workforce strategy in cross-functional planning.
• Build strong partnerships with Operations, Training/Quality, HR, Finance, Revenue Cycle, Digital, IT, Compliance, and clinical/business stakeholders.
• Promote a culture of data-driven decision-making, continuous improvement, accountability, innovation, and proactive capacity management.

Qualifications

Education

• Bachelor's degree in Business, Analytics, Operations Management, Healthcare Administration, Finance, or a related field preferred; or an equivalent combination of education and/or relevant professional experience.

Experience

• 8+ years of progressive workforce management experience within a complex contact center or engagement center environment; healthcare and Patient Access experience strongly preferred.
• Demonstrated experience leading forecasting, capacity planning, scheduling, real-time management, and workforce analytics at scale.
• Hands-on experience with workforce management platforms such as Calabrio, NICE, Verint, or similar required.
• Experience with contact center platforms such as Webex Contact Center or similar and their integration with workforce management tools preferred.
• Experience with RPA, intelligent automation, digital self-service, or AI-enabled operational programs required; experience measuring automation capacity and ROI strongly preferred.
• Experience developing staffing budgets, workforce scenarios, labor-cost analyses, and executive-level capacity recommendations.
• Prior people-management experience, including leading analysts, schedulers, real-time teams, automation resources, or similar functions.
• Experience supporting business continuity, major technology implementations, organizational growth, or operational transformation preferred.

Knowledge, Skills & Abilities

• Expert knowledge of workforce management principles, including forecasting, capacity planning, scheduling, shrinkage, adherence, conformance, occupancy, real-time management, and workforce optimization.
• Strong understanding of omnichannel contact-center operations and the application of WFM principles to digital and back-office workloads.
• Working knowledge of RPA, AI, digital self-service, and digital-workforce concepts and how automation capacity factors into staffing and channel strategy.
• Advanced analytical and modeling skills, with proficiency in Excel and reporting/BI tools; SQL or comparable data-query skills a plus.

Where you can work from

This job is 100% remote, for applicants who live in the United States.