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 your proudest accomplishment of 2025?
Editor’s note: Responses were lightly edited for clarity and length.
Paul Chausse Jr. Senior Vice President and Chief Revenue Cycle Officer at Tampa (Fla.) General Hospital: My proudest accomplishment in 2025 was taking AI out of the “lab” and into the core of our revenue cycle. Standing up a production-grade, agentic AI operating model where humans and bots truly coexist. We deployed generative co-pilots across coding, authorization, and denial migration with strong human-in-the-loop governance, curbing preventable denials and retiring rogue, low-value tasks. The impact was faster cash, cleaner claims, and a better experience for patients and staff. Just as important, we built a repeatable platform that positions us to scale responsibly in 2026.
Brett McMillan. Vice President of Revenue Cycle Operations at VCU Health (Richmond, Va.): I’m most proud about the work our teams accomplished this year around price transparency and patient financial advocacy. Our goal this year was to deliver an accurate pre-service patient financial estimate at the time of scheduling to all patients and for all types of scheduled services. We are happy to report that VCU Health has achieved top quartile (or better) performance on the fraction of visits with a finalized estimate attached, the accuracy of those estimates, and the level of automation used to create those estimates! This proactive approach to engaging with our patients pre-service about the cost of care promotes engagement on payment and financial assistance options, and also improves the quality of our registration data by prompting patients to add secondary coverages. As a result of these efforts this year we’ve seen a robust improvement in pre-service collections, a downward trajectory in bad debt write-offs and meaningful shift in the proportion of uncompensated care that is designated as charity vs. bad debt.
Tim Reiner. Senior Vice President of Revenue Management at AdventHealth (Altamonte Springs, Fla.): This year marked a major leap forward in AdventHealth’s focus in patient financial experience. Over 60% of scheduled procedures now receive pre-service estimates, with an accuracy rate exceeding 80%. This achievement represents not only a data milestone but also a tangible example of our mission in action to promote clarity and compassion to patients we serve.
Next question: What is your top priority in 2026? If you are interested in responding, please send responses to Andrew Cass at acass@beckershealthcare.com
