Ask a Revenue Cycle Leader is a new series featuring insights from health system and hospital revenue cycle executives nationwide. Becker’s poses questions on the most pressing issues in healthcare finance — from payer relations and automation to workforce and patient experience. We welcome responses from all revenue cycle, finance and reimbursement leaders.
Question: What is one investment in your revenue cycle that paid off faster than you expected?
Editor’s note: Responses were lightly edited for clarity and length.
Jennifer Dzendzel. Associate Chief Revenue Officer, UK Healthcare (Lexington, Ky.): One of the highest-impact investments in the revenue cycle is strengthening the front end — specifically through disciplined alignment across functions and a focus on upstream integrity. By equipping teams with the right tools, clear expectations, and real-time decision support, organizations can shift from reactive rework to proactive prevention. The return is often immediate, with improvements in denial reduction, cash acceleration, and consistency in the patient financial experience. More importantly, it demonstrates how aligned leadership can generate rapid, enterprise-level results while building greater patient trust.
Paul LePage. Vice President of Revenue Cycle at UC Davis Health (Sacramento, Calif.): One investment that paid off significantly faster than expected was implementing a focused denials prevention program rather than continuing to treat denials as a back-end collections issue.
Traditionally, organizations invest heavily in denial management teams that work denials after they occur. We shifted our approach and invested in front-end analytics, denial root-cause identification, and accountability across patient access, revenue integrity, coding and managed care. We built denial scorecards by payer, denial category and operational owner, then established a governance structure that required action plans for recurring denial trends.
What surprised me was the speed of the results. Within a few months, we saw measurable reductions in authorization-related denials, registration errors and medical necessity denials. The impact wasn’t just on cash collections — it reduced rework, improved staff productivity, shortened accounts receivable days, and lowered our overall cost-to-collect.
Marji Karlin. Chief Revenue Officer, NYC Health + Hospitals (New York City): We made a significant investment in our revenue cycle workforce by establishing the Revenue Cycle Institute (RCI) in 2019. Originally conceived to deliver foundational skills and professional development across our revenue cycle community, RCI has scaled remarkably. Today, through a mix of in-person, virtual, and eLearning modules, the institute clocks over 14,000 course completions annually. Furthermore, we have expanded its scope to include robust new employee onboarding programs and a dedicated revenue cycle quality assurance team.
While it is difficult to directly attribute hard dollars to this investment, we are certain that a highly trained, well-prepared workforce substantially reduces costly turnover, minimizes registration and billing errors, and has contributed significantly to our year-over-year successes.
Next question: What’s the one revenue cycle initiative you’re prioritizing for the second half of 2026 and why? If you are interested in responding, please send responses to Andrew Cass at acass@beckershealthcare.com.
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