Leaders of two of the nation’s largest for-profit health systems — Nashville-based HCA Healthcare and King of Prussia, Pa.-based Universal Health Services — highlighted the benefits of their revenue cycle investments during their first-quarter earnings calls.
HCA CFO Mike Marks said the system has been working aggressively to counter what he described as continued elevated denial and underpayment activity, particularly from Medicare Advantage plans. The system has worked over the past several years to add resources, technologies and other capabilities to “really go after the root causes of the denials.”
“But the denials and underpayments are still really high, and so it’s a key part of our industry to continue to work together on,” he said. “We launched, over the last 18 months, a series of partnerships with many of our strategic payer partners. These partnerships really focus on digital integration to try to share more digital and structured data back and forth between us and our payers, eliminate faxes, eliminate paper.”
UHS CFO Steve Filton said that UHS is not seeing a material increase in denials.
“Others have cited more aggressive payer behavior; our investments in revenue cycle technology, personnel and processes, particularly in acute [care], are allowing us to keep pace.”
In 2025, UHS deployed and scaled eight different use cases of AI solutions in its revenue cycle that are “yielding significant benefits, including improvements in denials management and revenue capture,” CEO Marc Miller said.
UHS is planning to roll out revenue cycle AI tools in its behavioral health business in 2026.
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