The Claims Adjudication Manager provides end-to-end operational leadership for one or more US healthcare payer claims functions. The role leads frontline leaders and cross-functional support teams, owns service delivery and client governance, and drives quality, compliance, workforce effectiveness, financial discipline, transformation, and continuous improvement.
Key Responsibilities
Operational Leadership
- Lead claims adjudication delivery across multiple teams, queues, products, or lines of business, with the final organization size determined by the approved account model.
- Provide direction to Supervisors, Team Leads, SMEs, Quality Analysts, Trainers, and other operational support roles.
- Own delivery against client-defined SLAs, KPIs, quality standards, turnaround times, contractual controls, and operational commitments.
- Establish disciplined governance for inventory, backlog, aging, pends, rework, high-dollar claims, escalations, and service recovery.
- Ensure operational readiness for benefit changes, policy updates, system releases, seasonal volume, migrations, and new scope transitions.
Client and Stakeholder Management
- Serve as a senior operational contact for payer stakeholders and TCS leadership.
- Lead recurring operational reviews and contribute to monthly and quarterly business reviews using accurate performance, risk, and action-plan reporting.
- Manage executive escalations, communicate impact and containment actions, and drive sustainable resolution.
- Build effective partnerships across Client Operations, Quality, Training, Workforce Management, Technology, HR, Finance, Compliance, and Transformation teams.
Quality, Risk, and Compliance
- Maintain a strong control environment for claim accuracy, financial accuracy, documentation, privacy, access, and audit evidence.
- Oversee root cause analysis, corrective and preventive actions, quality calibration, and remediation of recurring defects.
- Support audit readiness and compliance with HIPAA; applicable CMS, Medicare, Medicaid, and state requirements; client policies; TCS controls; and account-specific procedures.
- Escalate material delivery, compliance, privacy, financial, and customer-impact risks through established governance channels.
People, Workforce, and Financial Management
- Build leadership capability through coaching, succession planning, performance management, recognition, and targeted development.
- Partner with Workforce Management and Talent Acquisition on demand forecasting, capacity, hiring, training throughput, scheduling, utilization, and retention.
- Manage controllable costs, overtime, staffing mix, productivity, and account financial commitments within delegated authority.
- Promote a culture of ethics, inclusion, accountability, customer focus, and continuous improvement.
Transformation and Continuous Improvement
- Identify opportunities to improve workflow, controls, first-pass accuracy, automation, straight-through processing, and digital enablement.
- Develop business cases and implementation plans with Technology, Transformation, Quality, and Client stakeholders.
- Track realized outcomes and sustain improvements through standard work, governance, and performance reporting.
Required Qualifications
- Bachelor's degree required; an advanced degree is preferred.
- Eight or more years of US healthcare payer operations experience, including substantial claims adjudication experience and at least five years in people and delivery leadership roles.
- Demonstrated experience leading multi-team healthcare operations and frontline leaders; the final span will be aligned to account size and complexity.
- Deep understanding of professional and institutional claims, benefits, eligibility, authorization, provider reimbursement, coordination of benefits, adjustments, denials, pends, appeals or payment-integrity touchpoints.
- Experience with Commercial, Medicare Advantage, Medicaid, managed care, or employer-sponsored plan operations.
- Experience with an enterprise payer claims platform such as Facets, QNXT, HealthRules, NASCO, Amisys, or an equivalent system.
- Strong client relationship management, executive communication, operational governance, financial acumen, risk management, and data-driven decision-making skills.
- Ability to work from the Cincinnati area and support client-defined business hours, including schedule flexibility during transitions, peak periods, or critical incidents.