Good Is Just the Starting Point: 3 Lessons in Rethinking Revenue Cycle Performance

Revenue cycle leaders don’t need anyone telling them the work is getting harder. Payer complexity keeps growing, staffing is a constant challenge, and teams spend too much time managing work instead of moving claims toward payment. Even organizations with experienced people and one of the industry’s most established platforms can struggle to keep pace.

The trouble is that “good enough” is easy to settle for. When the current way of working is familiar and the alternatives are uncertain, it’s natural to adapt around limitations rather than question them. But that comfort can come at a cost: if you never ask whether the status quo is holding you back, you may never find out how much more your team could achieve.

Rochester Regional Health (RRH) asked that question. Its experience with Auxo, Revology’s AI-powered insurance management platform, offers three lessons: how to challenge assumptions, how to get to value faster, and how to know when to build on a partnership that’s working.

1. Don’t let the way you’ve always worked dictate what’s possible.

The EHR is generally the backbone of the operation. It’s where considerable time, money, and resources have been invested, and it makes sense to get everything you can out of it. But, when you build your workflows around what your existing systems allow, those limitations can start to feel like the only way to work.

At RRH, insurance follow-up staff were sorting through work queues containing thousands of accounts, while managers depended on IT to make changes to priorities and workflows. It was time-consuming, and responding quickly to shifting payer behavior wasn’t easy.

With Auxo, RRH leaders could adjust their own workflow strategies and automatically direct the right work to the right people. The result was less time managing work and more time moving claims through the revenue cycle.

Initially they thought the existing technology was working fine. By bringing in a new perspective, they opened doors they didn’t know were closed.

2. Don’t underestimate the power of early wins.

We’ve all seen or heard stories of technology projects filled with promises but resulting in implementation timelines that keep stretching. Meanwhile, the work doesn’t stop, payer complexity keeps growing, and teams are still expected to deliver results. That’s why time to value matters.

At RRH, Auxo began making a difference quickly. Leaders gained visibility and control, employees spent less time managing queues, and the platform’s intuitive design made adoption easy.

Within the first year, RRH improved its net collection rate from 98.0% to 98.4%, reduced hospital insurance A/R greater than 90 days by 25.2%, and eliminated seven vacancies without sacrificing performance.

According to RRH CEO Dr. Richard Davis, “the speed at which Auxo began delivering value was impressive. We expanded our use of the platform almost immediately, and within the first year, the results were clear across the key performance measures that mattered most to our organization.”

Results like those give leaders something more valuable than another promising technology roadmap. They give them confidence that the investment is actually changing the operation for the better.

3. When something works, don’t be afraid to hit the gas.

The original plan at RRH called for a multi-year rollout of Auxo. But when leaders saw how quickly the platform was delivering value and how readily employees embraced it, they changed course. Instead of waiting years, RRH expanded deployment across additional hospitals and physician operations in just a few months.

That’s what happens when a technology partnership goes beyond checking boxes on an implementation plan. A good partner understands your operation, moves quickly to solve real problems, and continues looking for ways to make things better. When a partnership delivers results, it makes sense to lean in rather than wait for the next scheduled milestone.

RRH continues working with Revology to introduce new AI capabilities and find additional opportunities to improve revenue cycle performance. The initial implementation became just the beginning of what the two organizations could accomplish together.

A little perspective can go a long way.

RRH wasn’t looking to overhaul its revenue cycle. It wanted to help their people do their jobs more effectively, reduce unnecessary work, and give leaders better tools to manage performance. Even strong operations have room to get better, but recognizing those opportunities sometimes requires questioning the processes you’ve come to accept as normal.

After all, just because something has always worked a certain way doesn’t mean it has to stay that way.

Register here  for our November 5 webinar with Rochester Regional Health to learn how RRH improved collections, increased productivity, and gained greater control over insurance follow-up.