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30 WOMEN'S LEADERSHIP POPULATION HEALTH Mercyhealth's Kimberly Scaccia on what keeps her inspired By Kelly Gooch K imberly Scaccia began as vice president of revenue cycle at Mercyhealth in March 2020, and she has helped the health system navigate the COVID-19 pandemic while striving to motivate, inspire and listen to members of her team. Before joining Janesville, Wis.-based Mercyhealth, she was director of the healthcare practice at Baker Tilly, a national management consult- ing firm, and she also was a manager in healthcare at KPMG. Early in her career, Ms. Scaccia worked at Roseville, Calif.-based Ad- ventist Health and Halifax Health in Daytona, Beach, Fla. Here, Ms. Scaccia shares with Becker's the challenges she faces as a fe- male leader, how she stays inspired and her 2021 daily mantra. Editor's note: Responses were lightly edited for length and clarity. Question: Who had the biggest influence on your decision to go into healthcare? Kimberly Scaccia: I was a paralegal/legal assistant in my 20s. I got tired of working for law firms and landed a job as a legal assistant inside a hospital. at small system got acquired by Adventist Health, and of course, when that happened, they did not need in-house legal counsel anymore. ey said, "Here is your choice of positions." One thing led to another, and I started working for the chief nursing officer and CFO. at is really what began my career in healthcare. I loved what I did as an assistant, but I had a revenue cycle director who saw something in me and encouraged me to go back to school. He recruited me into a technology coordinator position and made me stretch my abilities. He always told me with enough time and money anything is possible. His name was Dan Wolcott, and he would be the one who made me see my potential in healthcare and started me down my career path. Q: What is the greatest challenge you face as a female leader? KS: For about nine or 10 years in my career, I always felt like I could say something, and a man next to me could say the same thing, and his opinion would be taken at face value more than mine. It was a true struggle. And it wasn't until the past two years or so that my chal- lenges were very different. Part of this was my own self-awareness. Moreover, here at Mercy, we have numerous women leaders. I had not experienced that anywhere else. Having a lot of women in leadership, we're all strong, educated and, of course, opinionated. Since joining, my challenge has been to take it all in, to become even more self-aware of how I am perceived and ensure I don't overpower anyone else sim- ply because I am pushing what I believe. Sometimes we have to agree to disagree, and really learn to listen with open ears and minds to all opinions to ensure we come to the right decision for the organization. Q: How do you stay inspired on hard days? KS: I had a wonderful opportunity to take a course with national speaker and motivator Michael Allosso. His mantra that day was that as a leader, you are always on stage. For me, staying inspired means I always have to remember I'm always on stage, regardless of how I feel, regardless of what happened yesterday, last night or this morning. It is my job to be inspired to keep my team motivated too — even when the days are long and hard, and we don't hit the cash goal — to li them up and talk about the good things and how we are going to make it. For me, staying inspired may be a book, it may be meditation, but most of the time, I stay inspired knowing I am the one who has to keep that team motivated and moving. Q: What is your daily mantra? KS: In 2021, my daily mantra is, "My breath is my anchor, my anchor is my breath." I do a lot of yoga, and I have found a peace, serenity and a quiet mind in breathing and taking the time to listen. It goes back to the idea of being able to not only feel inspired but be inspiring. Q: Hospitals are now required to post standard charges, including payer-specific negotiated rates, for 300 services online. How have you prepared? KS: e challenge is we have an extraordinarily large EHR, and they were not ready, so we had to utilize an external vendor for a lot of things. We've done a lot of training, testing, and we've also done a lot of complaining to our electronic health vendor about the applications not working. I've said from day one this is another example of the govern- ment putting undue administrative burdens on hospitals and health- care systems for no value. e only people who are going to get value out of this are the insurance companies. ey're the only ones who are going to win anything out of this because a patient first is going to go where their doctor tells them to, and second, if they are shopping for services, they are going to call. Even with the information online, as an estimate, it clearly states that a patient should call. We cannot give a pa- tient an accurate estimate without validating and verifying everything, and patients don't know how to do that. Patients don't know how to tell us if they are in a managed care plan, PPO plan or if they have met their deductible requirements. We at Mer- cy have done everything we can to prepare for it. We're in Illinois and Wisconsin, so we've stayed in contact with the Illinois and Wisconsin hospital associations. We have a large group of IT folks who have been involved with the Epic application all year and who honestly are some of the best IT people I've ever worked with. We're in compliance, but it's one of those things I think will sit out on our website, with very few hits, and is going to be a waste of time, resources and money. n