The original version of this blog appears on Libman Education’s website here and was published on January 29, 2026.
In our article “3 Steps to Autonomous Coding Success: Assessing Your Organizational Challenges”, we focused on internal assessment: understanding your organization’s pain points, identifying your primary driver, and preparing to evaluate vendors with clarity. But even the best technology strategy will fall flat without the people to carry it forward.
Autonomous coding is not just an additional tool. It is an operational shift in how work is done, how value is measured, and how roles evolve. Organizations that invest in the people side of implementation see faster adoption, stronger buy-in, and better outcomes. This article focuses on how to engage your teams, address concerns openly, and build the cross-functional alignment that turns a technology investment into lasting operational improvement.
Coders and revenue integrity analysts often have the most questions when autonomous coding enters the conversation, and for good reason. They want to understand what it means for their work. Many have also seen technology rollouts that didn’t deliver on their promises, which makes healthy skepticism understandable.
Starting with kindness and genuine transparency is the best approach. Be clear about why the organization is exploring autonomous coding and what problems it is meant to solve. Is it because you’re currently paying high contracted coders and you want to reduce mandatory overtime or PTO limitations? Is it because you’ve been sending service lines offshore and want to bring work in-house without overwhelming your current team? Explaining and acknowledging the pain points you’re trying to solve helps your teams understand the goal: solving operational challenges in a way that supports them, not replaces them.
Once you have explained the reasoning behind exploring autonomous medical coding, the next step is starting conversations about what it means for individuals and their roles: what is going to change, what will stay the same, and what new opportunities it can open for them.
One of the most powerful shifts leaders can make is to frame the conversation around elevation: what new opportunities this creates for people to grow.
No longer having to function and live on the defense and reactive side, leaders can have real conversations with their teams to understand where their team members want to develop and upskill their abilities, where they see areas for improvement or areas to be more proactive that they didn’t have time before to do because they had backlogs or mandatory overtime, areas where some coders may really enjoy and want to just focus on instead of moving from different coding types day by day because that’s where they are needed on that day.
The possibilities in the revenue cycle are vast. Revenue cycle teams have been stretched thin for years, and autonomous coding creates the breathing room to finally move from reactive to proactive. This can be through promotions, new roles, upskilling opportunities, more proactive processes, expanded denials analysis, or auditing and education roles. This technology is here to help us take one step forward, and maybe get one play ahead of the game.
Autonomous coding touches far more than the coding team. Compliance, IT, revenue integrity, clinical documentation improvement, and finance all have stakes in the outcome.
Early alignment across these groups is one of the most reliable predictors of a smooth implementation. Alignment is a very high-level jargony term, so let me try to break that down with a few recommendations I have seen work really well: Include a cross-functional team, including, but not limited to HIM, Revenue Integrity, IT, and Compliance, from the very beginning of the assessment of vendors all the way through implementation. That way, no one is surprised; every workflow is covered from coding to charging, to which interface it is coming through, to compliance, confirming it is meeting accuracy metrics. Without this entire team, this project would be a very difficult thing to work on alone.
Successful organizations establish shared goals early and clarify ownership across functions. They agree on how accuracy will be defined, how exceptions will be handled, and how performance will be governed. This creates collective accountability and makes downstream decisions much smoother.
The most successful organizations treat autonomous coding as an operational transformation, not just a technology deployment.
Education, communication, feedback loops, and leadership transparency all matter. People need to know not just what is changing, but how they will be supported through the change.
When change management is genuine and intentional, autonomous coding becomes what it should be: a tool for empowerment.
To see what a successful example of this can look like, check out Nym’s case study with Genesis HealthCare System.