As Vice President of Revenue Cycle Services at Aletheia Health Partners, Elizabeth Ward brings a strategic vantage point to the table. She has worked the payer side, the provider side, and the technology side of healthcare finance, all before she ever joined Aletheia.
Ward’s career began at Medicare, where she stayed until the agency closed her local office. From there, she moved into revenue cycle work with hospitals and providers directly, then joined technology firms including McKesson, Equifax, MedAssets (FinTrive), and Craneware. That path, spanning payer, provider, and IT perspectives, shaped the way she now approaches revenue cycle strategy for Aletheia’s hospital partners.
“I’ve worked on the payer side, the provider side, and the IT firm side,” Ward said. “It’s given me a well-rounded perspective.”
Along the way, she built a strong set of credentials. She is a Certified Healthcare Financial Professional and a Fellow through the Healthcare Financial Management Association, and she holds a Project Management Professional certification, a coding certification, and several Epic certifications for the electronic health record system used by most hospitals today.
Ward’s education followed a similarly steady path. She started at Georgia State University, completed her degree at the University of Phoenix, and earned her master’s in healthcare administration from Louisiana State University.
At Aletheia Health Partners, Ward oversees the revenue cycle division, a team that includes two managers and the full revenue cycle staff. Since arriving, her focus has been on the overall department’s structure including development of new operating procedures and improvement of processes across the board.
That structure translates directly into results for Aletheia’s rural hospital partners. Streamlining the revenue cycle accelerates cash flow, improves clean claim rates, and reduces aging accounts receivable, Ward said, while right-setting system edits so staff spend their time on the accounts that actually need attention rather than working every account regardless of priority. For rural hospitals often running lean teams, that kind of efficiency carries extra weight.
“There’s a lot of money left on the table,” Ward said. “And not just with rural health systems or critical access hospitals. Large systems have the same problems, they just have it on a bigger scale.”
Ward was drawn to Aletheia for its growth and its mission of helping hospitals, large and small, capture the reimbursement they’ve earned. Transparency stood out to her as well. She sees documenting the reasoning behind every process change, and working as a partner rather than a vendor, as central to doing the job right.
Outside the office, Ward is a proud Georgia native, born in Alabama but a Georgia resident since 1973. She and her husband are college football regulars, splitting loyalties between Georgia, Ohio State, and Alabama depending on who’s asking, and they make time for Braves games, concerts, and weekend trips to flea markets and farmer’s markets. Family visits often take her to Richmond, home to three of her four grandchildren, with a fifth on the way. Venice and Hawaii rank among her favorite trips along with ziplining at Niagara Falls.