Hospitals and health systems continue to see rising labor costs; up 5% in October 2025 compared to a year ago. Despite this, improvements in productivity and patient experience have remained stagnant or declined in recent years. These trends are especially pronounced in the area of revenue cycle management (RCM), which is often highly labor-intensive and inefficient, and results in providers leaving money on the table.
At Becker’s 13th Annual CEO + CFO Roundtable, Patrick Winter, Commure’s Senior Vice President of Commercial Operations, led a discussion with 21 health system executives on how AI can ease margin pressures by lowering costs, boosting revenue, and enhancing the patient and provider experience.
Supporting five of the 10 largest U.S. health systems, Commure’s AI-powered platform connects the end-to-end process of RCM via modular clinical and operational solutions.
Three key takeaways were:
- Providers have to do more with less. Claims denial rates continue to rise, even as the cost to collect has increased across the sector. The effect is a margin vise: health systems are strained by higher operating costs while receiving less reimbursement from commercial payers for the same care.
Addressing margin pressures through technology is central to Commure’s mission, according to Mr. Winter. “How do we help healthcare organizations lower costs, increase capacity, and maintain and enhance quality?”
- Using AI to shore up labor strain and costs. Labor remains the single largest line item for hospitals: 56% of total expenses in 2024, according to the American Hospital Association. Yet clinical and administrative teams are stretched thinner each year.
Executives at the roundtable emphasized that the ROI in AI is not merely transactional; it is structural. By automating administrative burdens, organizations can protect clinician time, reduce burnout, and improve retention, outcomes that directly influence margins.
The discussion also highlighted operational use cases where AI dramatically outperforms traditional staffing models. For example, a human-staffed call center handling appointment scheduling incurs an average $6 cost per scheduled call. An AI-enabled call center, by contrast, operates with unlimited capacity, eliminating hold times and busy signals, and reducing the cost per scheduled call to approximately $1. Health systems unable to fulfill appointment requests off-hours due to staffing costs can now capture additional appointments. Patient satisfaction with the AI option is slightly higher, demonstrating that automation can enhance both efficiency and experience while enabling scale.
In an environment where staffing shortages and wage inflation show no signs of abating, these gains represent meaningful relief. AI allows health systems to redirect labor toward higher-value activities, contain costs, and sustain service levels that would otherwise require staffing increases.
- Enhancing revenue cycle with end-to-end AI. Commure has built a revenue cycle platform that supports the patient experience, supports providers, and enables greater throughput at lower costs. Commure supports the RCM process by taking time-consuming tasks off providers’ plates through ambient scribing, autonomous coding, charge capture and claim submissions.
On the front end, technology streamlines referrals, prior authorizations, and patient intake, raising the likelihood of producing a clean claim. On the back end, AI expedites reconciliation, accelerates denial management, automates appeals, and manages patient payment follow-up. Together, these improvements increase the probability of reimbursement and materially shorten the time to payment.
“Our point of view is all of these things are connected and if you can apply technology to them, you can do so at a lower cost,” explained Mr. Winter. “That’s a force multiplier that creates step-level change.”
