As health systems face mounting margin pressure, finance leaders are turning to every available lever to stabilize or improve their operating margins, and some are finding relief in an unlikely place.
Asset Relifing, the practice of aligning the useful life of assets — including buildings, equipment and IT assets — with a more accurate representation of their actual use, has quietly gained traction across the industry as organizations look to improve operating margins without reducing staffing levels or services. The approach can increase operating margin immediately, with little to no disruption for providers that implement it.
Rural healthcare organizations are under intensifying pressure. Nearly 46% of rural hospitals are operating with negative margins, and more than 400 are considered vulnerable to closure. At the same time, workforce shortages persist: although about one in five Americans lives in rural communities, only about 10% of physicians practice there, contributing to widespread gaps in access and care delivery.
Health systems are paying twice for the same clinical talent. Most have not figured that out yet.
At large academic medical centers, hundreds of clinical students rotate through hospitals and outpatient sites every year. They work beside nurses, therapists, and pharmacists. They are evaluated daily by preceptors who form fast, accurate judgments about who they would hire. Most of those students do eventually get hired somewhere. Usually not where they trained.
By most accounts, the first wave of AI adoption in healthcare revenue cycle management (RCM) has been swift.
AI spending overall in healthcare nearly tripled between 2024 and 2025 to $1.4 billion.1 RCM functionality—including coding and billing automation, patient engagement, and prior authorization support—were among the top areas of investment.1 By 2026, 75% of US health systems reported using at least one AI application, up from 59% in 2025.2 The most widely adopted AI solutions include RCM functionalities such as coding, denial prediction, admin chatbots, and pre-populated appeals.2
Every healthcare AI vendor talks about accuracy as if it were one thing. If it can pass a medical exam, then it must be right for your health system. Right?
Not necessarily. There’s a reason the growth of administrators in health systems has far outpaced the growth of physicians. Health systems’ biggest cost drivers aren’t necessarily problems they would ask a clinician to fix.
More than four years after the No Surprises Act took effect, there has been significant public reporting on the independent dispute resolution process, as well as individual arbitration awards. But what happens after arbitration? As many independent physician practices are learning, many arbitration awards are going unpaid.
TL;DR: Screening identified the crisis. Referrals exposed the bottleneck. Even strong integrated behavioral health models cannot fully support young people during waits, between visits, after hours, or when they are not ready to engage with traditional care. As youth increasingly turn to digital and AI tools on their own, health systems need a safer answer: a human-led, AI-supported model that is accountable, scalable, and connected to the clinical team.
The mid-revenue cycle is where medicine, documentation, and coding converge to produce the record that determines reimbursement, risk adjustment metrics, and quality scores. Physicians make the clinical decisions that the entire record is built on. Yet at the stage where those decisions are translated into coded outcomes, physicians are largely absent from the process.
Every denial, appeal, reconciliation and audit rests on the same quiet assumption: the right answer arrives after the fact. A claim goes out. Weeks pass. A payer responds. Someone reworks it. Payment comes late and often less than it should. An entire industry has organized itself around downstream correction, absorbing the cost of being late as if it were inevitable.
The internet and telecommunications services are essential tools for healthcare providers. Telehealth services, in particular, allow for remote consultations, monitoring, and information exchange. While technological capabilities have transformed healthcare, it has also exposed a disparity in access, with many rural Americans still struggling to connect with healthcare providers due to the lack of broadband internet access.
Elevate Dental Partners announced the launch of Reimagine, a new interactive financial modeling tool that exposes a hard truth many dentists never calculate: remaining independent often comes at a multi-million-dollar opportunity cost.
As health systems move toward mature precision medicine programs, the operational focus is shifting from simple connectivity to workflow sophistication. Most clinical and IT leaders recognize that integrating genomics into the Electronic Health Record (EHR) is essential for efficiency. Recent data highlights the scale of that impact: EHR-integrated genetic testing is 75% faster for ordering and 80% faster for results management compared to traditional lab portals.1
Avoidable delays in patient care have long challenged health systems, increasing costs, straining capacity, and disrupting patient flow. Yet many organizations lack the data needed to identify their root causes. West Tennessee Healthcare, a not-for-profit system with seven hospitals serving 19 counties, is using AI-powered tools to bring actionable insights directly into care management workflows.
Health systems have long known that rural patients face steeper odds when it comes to accessing care. Physician shortages have created “medical deserts” in rural America. Currently, around 43 million people live in rural areas with primary care provider shortages. In addition, many rural patients must travel outside their communities for specialty care at regional networks or facilities that partner with metropolitan health systems.
For decades, healthcare operations have been organized around a simple reality: the EHR is the source of truth.
Scheduling systems, referral platforms, patient engagement tools, analytics dashboards, and the broader healthcare technology stack were built around that foundation, helping organizations act on information stored in the EHR and write outcomes back into it.
Anyone who has built or has considered building a specialty pharmacy within their health system knows it’s not easy. It’s essentially a business within a business. You need operational sophistication across every function while still delivering on your core mission: providing high-quality, personalized patient care.
Anesthesia plays a crucial role in a patient’s health journey, directly influencing the accessibility and timing of life-saving treatments. However, persistent physician shortages and workforce gaps in rural areas have led to limited procedures, scheduling, and services.
It has happened hundreds of times: I’m called into the ICU as a Palliative Care specialist, ask who the patient is and what matters most, and afterward a family member pulls me aside to say, “No one has ever had this conversation with us before. I wish someone had done this sooner. Thank you.”
Multiple guidelines recommend ongoing breast cancer risk assessment for women, beginning by age 25, to identify individuals at increased risk who may need enhanced breast cancer screening.1,2. A risk-based approach to breast cancer screening has been shown to be both acceptable and preferred.3. Further, digital cancer risk assessment tools, such as Ambry Genetics’ validated CARE platform,4, have made breast cancer risk assessment more accessible than ever. Here, we share three important insights from our 5+ years of experience implementing digital cancer risk assessment at breast imaging centers across the U.S.
Rural healthcare leaders are turning resource limits into a sharper lens for technology investment.
As federal initiatives like the $50 billion Rural Health Transformation Program infuse rural health systems with new capital, the organizations seeing the most impact are not spending the most — they’re spending most intentionally. Innovation is judged less by novelty than by results: whether a tool can extend clinical capacity, improve access and health outcomes, or support financial sustainability.