Nearterm

Graduating from a radiologic technology program means you have cleared the clinical foundation. What happens in the first 12 months after graduation determines how quickly your career builds real market value — and most new graduates don't get specific guidance on what that actually looks like.

Get your ARRT primary certification current and start identifying your post-primary pathway immediately. CT is currently running the highest vacancy rate of any imaging modality — 19.4% as of 2025. MRI is close behind. Both carry significantly stronger compensation and placement demand than general radiography alone, and the post-primary credential is the gate. Prioritize acute care hospital experience over outpatient settings in your first role. Travel contracts, PRN assignments, and future hospital-level placements all carry minimum acute care requirements — and building that experience early keeps every career door open. Document your scanner platform experience from day one. GE, Siemens, Philips — the specific system you operate on matters to facilities evaluating fit, and a recruiter placing you for a travel or direct hire role will ask. Get your state licensure sorted for more than one state if travel assignments are on your radar. Multi-state licensure takes time to process and is the most common administrative bottleneck that delays a travel contract start date. Build a relationship with a recruiter who specializes in radiology — not a general healthcare staffing firm. The placements that match modality, scanner, shift, and facility type correctly come from recruiters who already know the difference.

Khadiza works with radiology professionals at every stage — new graduates building their first acute care foundation and experienced techs ready for their next travel assignment or direct hire placement.

Reach out to Khadiza directly.
📞 (281) 646-1330 | 🌐 nearterm.com

The job description covers the obvious: manage the billing function, oversee collections, drive denial resolution, report to the CFO. What it does not cover is everything that actually determines whether a Revenue Cycle Director succeeds or struggles in the first 90 days.

Payer behavior that falls outside standard contract terms and requires a director-level escalation path nobody documented. Team dynamics inherited from a previous leader whose management style left the department either overly dependent or quietly disengaged. Technology workflows built around a system the organization is mid-migration away from, requiring the new director to operate in two environments simultaneously. Cross-departmental friction between coding, clinical documentation, and finance that has been unresolved for months and lands on the RC Director's desk the first week because nobody else has the authority to address it.

Then there is the political layer — navigating CFO expectations, board-level financial reporting timelines, and department leads who each believe their workflow is the priority. None of that is in the job description. All of it determines whether the placement holds.

Gayle Tapps evaluates Revenue Cycle leadership candidates against what the role actually demands — not just what the posting describes. Because the eight things that break a placement are almost never the eight things the organization thought to screen for.

Connect with Gayle Tapps for Revenue Cycle leadership search.
📧 [email protected] | 📞 (281) 646-1330 | 🌐 nearterm.com

The CFO and the Revenue Cycle Director are looking at the same five metrics every single week. What they're accountable for — and what they need from those numbers — is completely different.

When AR days extend, the CFO sees a cash flow timing problem that affects forecasting and liquidity planning. The RC Director sees a PFS and AR follow-up ownership problem that needs to be resolved at the workflow level before it moves the forecast at all. When denial rate climbs, the CFO is calculating revenue at risk and bad debt exposure. The RC Director is tracing denial root cause — payer escalation strategy, overturn rate, and where in the front-end process the claim started failing.

That distinction matters enormously when a Revenue Cycle leadership seat goes vacant. A CFO making a hiring decision purely from a financial reporting perspective may evaluate candidates differently than the operational reality of the RC Director role actually requires. The candidate who can speak to a CFO's financial concerns and still own the denial management, coding quality, and collections accountability underneath them — that is a specific and uncommon profile.

Gayle Tapps evaluates Revenue Cycle leadership candidates from both sides of that table. Twenty years of healthcare operations experience means understanding what the CFO needs the function to deliver — and what the RC Director needs to actually run it.

Connect with Gayle Tapps for Revenue Cycle and Healthcare Finance leadership search.
📧 [email protected] | 📞 (281) 646-1330 | 🌐 nearterm.com

Healthcare organizations spent $19 billion on back-office Revenue Cycle technology — and 29% of total healthcare IT spend now flows directly into RCM infrastructure. That level of investment doesn't reflect a support function. It reflects a core financial operation that determines whether a health system collects what it earns.

Yet 70% of healthcare executives cite operational efficiency as their top priority heading into 2026 — while only 37% are responding to burnout and staffing pressure through automation. The gap between those two numbers is where Revenue Cycle leadership vacancies do the most damage.
Technology investment without experienced leadership to drive it produces dashboards that report the problem without resolving it.

AR days don't improve because a system flags them. Denial rates don't drop because a workflow tool tracks them. Both require a Revenue Cycle leader who owns the accountability layer between the data and the decision — and who can translate what the numbers are showing into operational action at the payer, coding, and collections level.

Revenue Cycle is no longer a back-office function. The organizations treating it as enterprise infrastructure — and staffing it accordingly — are the ones protecting margin while others explain variances.

Connect with Nearterm to discuss Revenue Cycle leadership search.

📞 (281) 646-1330 | 🌐 nearterm.com

63% of healthcare providers report active staffing gaps in their Revenue Cycle departments — leading to increased billing errors, slower collections, and growing compliance exposure. That figure comes from the American Academy of Professional Coders 2026 report. The gap is not coming. For most organizations, it is already here and already costing them.

What an RCM staffing gap actually produces is not always visible immediately. More coding errors reach the billing stage. AR follow-up falls behind as remaining staff absorb more than they were built to carry. Denied claims sit without a named workflow owner. Compliance risk grows quietly in the background — until a payer audit or regulatory review makes it visible all at once.

Nearterm addresses each of those consequences directly. RCM professionals matched to the specific gap. Interim coverage operational within days. Every candidate screened on payer mix familiarity and EMR depth. The permanent search runs in parallel without urgency pressure and without the wrong hire made under a deadline.

If your Revenue Cycle department is carrying a gap right now, contact Gayle Tapps at Nearterm.

📞 (281) 646-1330 · [email protected] · nearterm.com