New EHRs, AI tools and leadership teams are energizing revenue cycle leaders even as they navigate industry challenges.
Here is what five executives told the Becker’s CFO+Revenue Cycle podcast they are most excited about right now:
Lynn Ansley. Vice President of Revenue Cycle Management at Moffitt Cancer Center (Tampa, Fla.).
Ms. Ansley leads a team of nearly 640 at the standalone cancer center, where traditional robotic process automation already does work equal to about 500 full-time employees. Moffitt is now moving to Epic, and she sees the transition as a chance to question workflows the team long considered settled.
“It’s a really great time for us right now because we are in actually our build wave one for our Epic implementation, which is giving us the ability to kind of step back and rethink process that we historically thought was pretty great, but what’s happening is it’s opening our eyes to opportunities that have always been there,” Ms. Ansley said. “We just needed to see it through a different lens.”
Her leadership team works from the idea that “what’s good enough today is not good enough tomorrow,” she said. Moffitt regularly brings top front-line performers into development meetings to ask what they would change about their workflows if they had a magic wand, and a business automation and optimization team that reports into revenue cycle turns those ideas into quick wins.
Sheila Augustine. Executive Director of Revenue Cycle at Nebraska Medicine (Omaha).
Nebraska Medicine, a two-hospital, 855-bed system with about $3 billion in net patient revenue, put AI to work this year on missing and mismatched charges. The results surprised the team.
“This has really helped us to find things that essentially we didn’t even know were missing,” Ms. Augustine said.
Next up is charge reconciliation, a use case she hopes to close out by the end of the year and a task she said “nobody ever wants to do.” Ms. Augustine is just as energized by how staff respond when they help lead the work. When Nebraska Medicine brought in AI to help write appeals, two staff super users became the project’s champions and carried the message back to their peers.
Ms. Augustine said that when staff serve as super users on AI projects, “they get to see it and they get to feel the thrill of utilizing it.”
Karen Brown. Revenue Cycle Director at Heart of the Rockies Regional Medical Center (Salida, Colo.).
Ms. Brown joined the hospital in January, just as it began implementing Epic to replace registration and billing systems she described as archaic and largely manual. Many of the hospital’s patients are retirees who arrive with Medicare Advantage plans the hospital is not in network with, which can leave them confused about why their bills are so high.
Her biggest opportunity over the next two to three years lies outside the hospital’s walls.
“I want to strengthen the partnership with our local organizations, employers and community groups to increase awareness and improve access to care to help our patients understand their financial options before they receive services,” Ms. Brown said.
Inside the hospital, she has worked with physicians, hospitalists and the C-suite to show how signed notes, completed documentation and timely coding translate into revenue.
“A little joke that we have here since I’ve started is they do all the care and I handle the money to make sure they get paid,” she said.
Heather Dunn. Senior Vice President and Chief Revenue Officer at Novant Health (Winston-Salem, N.C.).
Ms. Dunn, who marked one year at Novant in March, said the first thing that excites her is the group she has assembled.
“I am particularly excited by the team that we just put together in revenue cycle for Novant Health,” Ms. Dunn said.
The new hires are bold, forward-thinking leaders coming at revenue cycle from a different perspective, she said, and the aim is both to change how Novant performs and to inspire peers across the country. The system has redesigned its revenue cycle operating model around centers of excellence and carved out transformation under a separate leader, because teams have to “keep the trains on the tracks at the same time that you’re laying new tracks.”
On the technology side, Ms. Dunn sees opportunity in voice AI. She said its potential clicked for her while ordering a pizza from Domino’s, when she realized partway through the call that she was talking to an AI agent.
“It is so much better than phone trees and some of the other voice automations that used to exist in the past,” she said. “It’s very conversational.”
She sees uses well beyond scheduling, including billing and benefits questions, with the potential to give patients access to information around the clock and hand them off to a person when needed.
Tracy Peffley. System Vice President of Revenue Cycle Management at Cleveland Clinic (Cleveland).
Ms. Peffley oversees a revenue cycle team of more than 3,800 full-time equivalents, including vendor staff, that collected more than $15 billion in net patient revenue in 2025. Asked what she is most excited about, she pointed first to how the organization now views her function.
“I am really excited to see that our executives are really seeing the value we bring to the organization and the impact positively that we have,” Ms. Peffley said.
That support reaches Cleveland Clinic CEO Tom Mihaljevic, MD, she said, who has asked what her team needs and backed its strategic initiatives. The system recently created a dedicated technology and innovation domain within its revenue cycle operating model, working in lockstep with its IT department.
Her second focus is redesigning the patient financial experience as employers shift more costs to patients and high-deductible plans grow. Cleveland Clinic has rolled out Apple Pay and Google Pay and is expanding self-service options.
“We want patients to pay. We want to make it easy for them to pay,” she said.
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