Chicago-based Northwestern Medicine has built a three-person revenue cycle automation team that processed about 400,000 tasks over the past fiscal year — work the health system estimates is equivalent to roughly 24 full-time employees.
Northwestern’s automation team manages about 30 automations across the revenue cycle.
“I like to say our automation team is small but mighty,” Atek Pandya, director of revenue cycle automation and strategy at Northwestern, said during a panel at Becker’s 11th Annual Health IT + Digital Health + RCM Conference. “We have three people who are doing programming and management of all of these about 30 automations, and that moves up and down depending on what we see as worthwhile.”
Those automations processed about 400,000 items during fiscal year 2026, which ended Aug. 31.
“That amounts to about 24 FTEs worth of work if you apply each of those functional standards,” according to Mr. Pandya, who estimated that work translates to about $1 million in savings tied to robotic process automation alone.
But the goal is not simply to automate away annoying tasks. The more effective strategy is to automate high-volume, repeatable work that the revenue cycle already understands well, then redirect employees toward more complex work.
“You want to automate your bread and butter,” he said. “You’re good at this, you know the ins and outs. Automate it and restaff your people to deal with the hard stuff.”
Mr. Pandya said he does not recommend approaching automation primarily as a way to cut jobs.
“I wouldn’t recommend that as a strategy,” he said. “I would recommend saying you’re going to build time back into the day and you can reallocate that staff to where you need them to be.”
That need is significant at Northwestern, which produces about 1.8 million claims per month across hospital and physician billing, according to Mr. Pandya.
“There’s plenty of work out there,” he said.
Northwestern is also using Epic tools to automate parts of the medical necessity and authorization denial process. Mr. Pandya said the system participated in a pilot involving Epic’s medical necessity appeal capabilities and saw about a 20% increase in collections for a population of outpatient medical necessity and authorization denials.
The system also saw processing time fall by roughly 20% to 40%.
Mr. Pandya said health systems should not be afraid to combine multiple technologies rather than search for one platform that does everything.
“Don’t be afraid of complexity and you can stack technologies,” he said.
At Northwestern, that can mean using Epic capabilities alongside RPA through Microsoft Power Automate or bringing in outside vendors where needed.
He described some parts of modern revenue cycle work as a form of “digital paper pushing,” where employees are still spending time on repetitive processing tasks even as workflows become more electronic.
The better use of staff is to move them toward “exception management” and more difficult cases.
“Get rid of the stuff that you don’t really need a big brain to deal with,” Mr. Pandya said. “Move your people into exception managers.”
His broader message to revenue cycle leaders: automation should be aimed at creating capacity, not simply eliminating positions.
“I promise you there’s still plenty of work there to do,” he said. “I wish we could get to everything, but we just can’t. And the technology is the way to be able to address that gap.”
