When Managing the Work Becomes the Work
Rochester Regional Health found a smarter way to manage insurance follow-up
A full work queue can look like a plan. Thousands of accounts are lined up, everyone has plenty to do, and the work keeps moving. Or at least it appears to.
At Rochester Regional Health (RRH), the revenue cycle team had built a strong operation. But before staff could do meaningful insurance follow-up, they often had to sort through queues containing thousands of accounts. Leaders knew which work needed attention, but changing priorities could require IT support to update the workflows.
When payer behavior shifted, the operation could not always shift with it. Time that should have gone toward resolving claims was being spent organizing the work around them.
A different question about capacity
This friction became harder to ignore as workforce pressure increased. Open positions were difficult to fill, while expectations for productivity and financial performance continued to rise. The obvious response would have been to focus on recruiting more people.
RRH took a different approach. Instead of asking how many seats needed to be filled, leadership looked at how much of the existing team’s capacity was being consumed by repetitive work and manual prioritization.
That distinction matters. Adding people to a process that wastes time may create more activity, but it does not create a better operating model. RRH wanted to give its team better tools, help leaders see what was happening across the operation, and direct staff toward the claims that mattered most.
Getting the right work to the right people
With Auxo, leaders could build and adjust game plans that automatically directed the right work to the right people. When priorities changed, revenue cycle leaders could directly intervene and make changes quickly instead of waiting for queues to be rebuilt or reprioritized.
That shift did more than make insurance follow-up faster. It gave control of the operation back to the people running it. Managers could focus on strategy and performance instead of queue administration. Staff could spend more time resolving accounts instead of deciding where to begin.
One of the clearest early signals was not a financial metric. It was adoption. Strong user response led RRH to expand Auxo across additional hospitals and physician operations, compressing what had been planned as a multi-year rollout into just a few months.
As Brenda Rodwell, Director of Hospital and BHN Billing at RRH, explained, the platform felt as though it had been built from an operational perspective, not just an IT lens. Training was quick, information was easier to access, and reporting became simpler.
The results followed
Within the first year, RRH increased its net collection rate from 98.0% to 98.4% and reduced hospital insurance A/R greater than 90 days by 25.2%. The organization also eliminated seven vacancies without sacrificing performance and achieved a 4.5x return on investment.
Those results matter. But the larger story is what made them possible: less time managing work, more time moving claims.
Revenue cycle has spent years trying to help people work queues faster. RRH’s experience points to a better question: is there a future where people don’t have to manage the queue at all?
The real promise of AI and automation is not simply to complete today’s work faster. It is to remove the administrative effort surrounding that work, so people can focus on the exceptions, decisions, and payer challenges that actually require their expertise.