A six-year-old boy needs a kidney. Healthcare needs something else: fewer barriers between human need and human care.
“It felt in some way like it was this reminder that I
existed and was seen at this time when so much of my experience with cancer had
really been behind closed doors.” — Ashleigh Bell Pedersen, cancer
survivor, speaking to NPR's My Unsung Hero, August 11, 2026.
The child behind the claim
Ethan Hackney is six years old.
He lives in Herring Cove, Nova Scotia.
And his family is searching for something no algorithm can
manufacture, no billing company can process, and no healthcare executive can
purchase off a shelf.
A kidney.
Ethan has lived with a serious kidney condition his entire
life. His mother, Jenny Hackney, recently shared publicly that the
family has reached the point where they are searching for a living kidney
donor.
The request is painfully simple.
Someone, somewhere, may be able to help.
The family is asking people to share Ethan's story and help
find that person. Public appeals identify Ethan by name and Herring Cove as his
community.
There is something about this story that stops you.
Perhaps because Ethan is six.
Perhaps because every parent understands what six should
look like.
School.
Friends.
Birthday parties.
Growing taller.
Learning things.
Making mistakes.
Getting annoyed with your parents.
Thinking the world is much bigger than it actually is.
Instead, Ethan's family is thinking about kidneys,
transplant evaluation, donors, hospitals, medical decisions and whether a
stranger might be willing to give part of themselves so their child can have
more time.
And that is where this story becomes bigger than
transplantation.
It becomes a story about what healthcare is really supposed
to accomplish.
Healthcare is supposed to move a human being from need
toward possibility.
Sometimes that requires a surgeon.
Sometimes a nurse.
Sometimes a physician.
Sometimes a caregiver.
Sometimes a donor.
And sometimes it requires hundreds of people working quietly
behind the scenes to make sure that the care actually happens.
That last part is where physicians and clinic owners should
pay attention.
Because we have created a healthcare industry that is
remarkably good at solving complicated clinical problems while remaining
strangely comfortable with unnecessary administrative ones.
We can perform extraordinary surgery.
Yet we still make physicians chase paperwork.
We can sequence genomes.
Yet we still make practices manually reconcile fragmented
information.
We can build increasingly sophisticated artificial
intelligence.
Yet a small clinic can still spend hours trying to
understand why a legitimate claim was not paid.
That is not a technology problem.
At least, not entirely.
It is a workflow problem.
And workflow problems eventually become human problems.
The uncomfortable question
Here is the question I want physicians and healthcare
leaders to sit with:
What if the biggest threat to better healthcare is not a
lack of innovation, but the amount of human attention we waste?
We talk constantly about innovation.
Artificial intelligence.
Robotics.
Precision medicine.
Digital health.
Virtual care.
Genomics.
Remote monitoring.
Agentic systems.
Clinical decision support.
All important.
But innovation has a strange habit in healthcare.
We build something new.
Then we connect it to something old.
Then we create another login.
Another dashboard.
Another alert.
Another workflow.
Another administrative task.
Another exception.
Another person who has to make sense of it all.
Eventually, the physician is sitting at a computer after
clinic, wondering why a profession built around human connection has become so
dependent on human beings moving information between boxes.
That is the paradox.
We keep inventing tools to save time while designing
workflows that consume it.
Ethan's story gives us a better way to think about
healthcare.
The objective is not technology.
The objective is not efficiency.
The objective is not automation.
The objective is more life, better care, less unnecessary
suffering, and more time for people to do the things only people can do.
Everything else is infrastructure.
What Ethan's story has to do with medical billing
At first glance, almost nothing.
Ethan needs a kidney.
A physician-owned clinic needs clean claims.
Those sound like completely different problems.
They are not.
Both are examples of the same fundamental healthcare
challenge:
There is a human need on one side and a complicated
system between that need and the resource required to meet it.
For Ethan, the system involves transplant medicine, donor
evaluation, clinical coordination, family support and access to an appropriate
donor.
For an outpatient practice, the system involves scheduling,
registration, eligibility, authorization, documentation, coding, claims,
adjudication, payment, denials and collections.
The clinical problem and financial problem are different.
But the operating principle is the same.
Every unnecessary barrier consumes human capacity.
And healthcare has a finite supply of that capacity.
Physicians do not have a time problem
They have a friction problem.
That distinction matters.
If you tell a physician:
“You need to manage your time better,”
you are often blaming the wrong person.
A physician cannot personally optimize away:
Payer portals.
Prior authorization.
Eligibility failures.
Duplicate documentation.
Unclear coding requirements.
Poorly integrated systems.
Manual claim corrections.
Denial follow-up.
Patient billing confusion.
Broken handoffs.
Credentialing delays.
Contract ambiguity.
Those are not personal productivity failures.
They are system design failures.
And physicians have been compensating for them for years.
They stay late.
They check messages after dinner.
They call payers.
They review charts.
They answer staff questions.
They solve problems that should never have reached them.
Then we wonder why burnout persists.
Perhaps we should stop asking:
“How can physicians work more efficiently?”
And start asking:
“Why are physicians doing this work in the first place?”
That is a much more uncomfortable question.
It is also a much more useful one.
The hidden economics of wasted attention
Suppose a physician spends 30 minutes every day dealing with
billing problems.
That sounds small.
It isn't.
Thirty minutes a day becomes approximately 125 hours over a
250-day working year.
That is more than three full workweeks.
Now imagine a five-physician practice.
The number becomes roughly 625 physician hours per year.
That is not an abstract administrative burden.
That is clinical capacity.
And the calculation becomes even larger when you include:
Practice managers.
Billers.
Front-desk staff.
Nurses.
Medical assistants.
Coders.
Administrators.
Everyone who touches the problem.
This is why the cost of administrative complexity is larger
than the invoice from a billing vendor.
The real cost includes the human time required to
compensate for the system's weaknesses.
The statistic that should make practice owners
uncomfortable
CMS has identified substantial administrative burden in
prior authorization alone.
CMS has cited an estimate of approximately 13 hours per
week spent by providers on prior authorization activities, equivalent to
roughly 700 hours per year per provider.
That number should change the conversation.
Because 700 hours is not merely “administrative burden.”
It is time.
Time is the currency of medicine.
A physician has a limited number of hours.
A nurse has a limited number.
A practice manager has a limited number.
A patient has a limited number.
So when healthcare creates unnecessary administrative work,
the system is not creating more capacity.
It is redistributing scarce human attention toward tasks
that often create little clinical value.
That is expensive.
And sometimes the most expensive thing about a bad workflow
is not the money.
It is what could have been done instead.
The contrarian view: stop measuring automation
This is where I disagree with much of the healthcare
technology conversation.
We celebrate automation too quickly.
A company says it automated one million transactions.
Great.
But did patients get better care?
Did physicians regain time?
Did staff experience less stress?
Did preventable denials decline?
Did cash flow become more predictable?
Did the practice reduce its cost to collect?
Did patients understand their bills better?
Did the organization eliminate unnecessary work?
If the answer is no, what exactly did we automate?
Activity is not improvement.
A faster bad process is still a bad process.
A beautiful dashboard does not create value by itself.
A sophisticated AI model does not create value by itself.
A million automated transactions do not create value by
themselves.
The real measure is:
What changed for the human being at the end of the
workflow?
Ethan's story gives us the right metric
Imagine measuring Ethan's healthcare journey by
administrative activity.
Number of appointments.
Number of forms.
Number of phone calls.
Number of referrals.
Number of tests.
Number of records exchanged.
Number of messages.
Those numbers might tell us something.
But they would miss the most important question.
Did Ethan get the kidney he needed?
That is the outcome.
Healthcare should think about its administrative systems the
same way.
Not:
How many claims did we submit?
But:
How many legitimate claims were paid accurately and
promptly?
Not:
How many denial tasks did our team complete?
But:
How many preventable denials did we eliminate?
Not:
How many calls did staff make?
But:
How many problems did we prevent from requiring a call?
Not:
How much work did automation perform?
But:
How much unnecessary work disappeared?
That is the difference between measuring activity and
measuring impact.
The revenue cycle is not a back-office problem
Physicians often hear the phrase “revenue cycle” and
mentally place it somewhere behind the clinical operation.
Billing is over there.
Clinical care is over here.
I think that separation is increasingly dangerous.
The revenue cycle determines whether a practice gets paid
for legitimate care.
That affects:
Staffing.
Equipment.
Technology.
Clinical programs.
Appointment availability.
Physician compensation.
Capital investment.
Access.
And ultimately, whether an independent practice remains
independent.
A practice can provide excellent medicine and still become
financially unstable.
That is not a contradiction.
It is an operational reality.
Clinical quality does not automatically produce financial
sustainability.
And financial sustainability does not automatically produce
clinical quality.
The two have to reinforce each other.
The mistake physicians make
Many physicians assume that if they hire a billing company,
the billing problem becomes someone else's problem.
It doesn't.
The work may be outsourced.
The accountability is not.
A physician-owner should still know:
What is being billed?
What is being collected?
What is being denied?
Why are claims being denied?
How much money is sitting in A/R?
How much is over 90 days?
How much staff time is spent chasing payment?
Which payers create the most friction?
Which errors are preventable?
Which problems originate upstream?
If the answer to these questions is:
“I don't know. My billing company handles it,”
that should be a warning sign.
Outsourcing can be smart.
Outsourcing visibility is not.
The bigger mistake healthcare makes
We often treat the claim as the beginning of the revenue
cycle.
It isn't.
The claim is the end product of dozens of earlier decisions.
The patient enters the practice.
Information is captured.
Insurance is entered.
Eligibility is checked.
Authorization may be obtained.
The encounter occurs.
Documentation is created.
Services are coded.
Charges are generated.
The claim is built.
Only then does the claim reach the payer.
By the time billing discovers the problem, the opportunity
to prevent it may already be gone.
This is why I believe:
The future of medical billing is upstream.
A denial is often a symptom
Consider a denied claim.
The obvious question is:
“How do we get this paid?”
That is necessary.
But it is not enough.
The better question is:
“Why did this claim become deniable?”
Maybe the patient's insurance information was wrong.
Maybe authorization was missing.
Maybe the authorization was attached to the wrong service.
Maybe the documentation did not support the billed service.
Maybe the code was inconsistent.
Maybe the payer rule changed.
Maybe information was entered twice and one version was
incorrect.
Maybe nobody knew who owned the exception.
The denial is where the problem became visible.
It may not be where the problem began.
That distinction is one of the most important ideas in
revenue-cycle management.
The upstream data problem
This is the foundation of my thinking around OnnX.
Healthcare billing is not primarily a billing problem.
It is a data-quality problem that becomes a billing
problem.
The information necessary for reimbursement is scattered
across:
EHRs.
Practice-management systems.
Payer portals.
Clearinghouses.
Authorization systems.
Referral workflows.
Scheduling systems.
Clinical notes.
Eligibility databases.
Human memory.
The more fragmented the information, the more humans become
the integration layer.
That is expensive.
It is also fragile.
People forget.
People misread.
People copy the wrong field.
People enter information twice.
People miss an update.
People get interrupted.
People leave.
A resilient system should not depend on perfect human
memory.
The best billing system should be boring
This may sound strange coming from someone building an
AI-powered billing company.
But I think it is important.
The best healthcare technology should not constantly demand
attention.
It should quietly make the right thing easier.
It should surface exceptions.
It should prevent avoidable errors.
It should explain what happened.
It should tell the right person what needs attention.
Then it should get out of the way.
The goal is not to create an exciting billing experience.
Nobody wakes up excited about billing.
The goal is to create a predictable one.
What physicians actually want
Most physicians do not want another dashboard.
They want to know:
Are we getting paid?
Are we missing money?
Why?
What needs my attention?
What doesn't?
Can I trust the numbers?
Is my staff drowning in administrative work?
Can I stop thinking about this?
That last question may be the most important.
Good technology earns trust by reducing the number of
things people have to think about.
Three expert lessons healthcare leaders should remember
Atul Gawande: reliability beats heroics
Dr. Atul Gawande's work has repeatedly examined how complex
healthcare systems can improve reliability through checklists, standardization,
teamwork and process design.
The lesson for revenue cycle is straightforward.
If a workflow only works when your best employee remembers
every exception, you do not have a reliable workflow.
You have a hero-dependent workflow.
That is dangerous.
Build systems that make the correct action easier.
Do not build systems that depend on extraordinary employees
rescuing ordinary processes.
Don Berwick: design around people
Dr. Don Berwick's work in healthcare quality has emphasized
patient-centeredness and improvement of systems rather than blaming
individuals.
That principle applies directly to administrative
operations.
When a patient receives a confusing bill, do not simply ask
why the patient is confused.
Ask why the system produced confusion.
When a physician spends an hour fixing a claim, do not
simply congratulate the physician for being diligent.
Ask why the claim required physician intervention.
Good systems make good behavior easier.
The current CMS direction: reduce administrative friction
CMS continues to push toward electronic prior authorization,
interoperability, standardized data exchange and changes to physician payment
and administrative processes. CMS's current physician-fee-schedule materials
include proposed 2027 payment policies, while its
electronic-prior-authorization work reflects a broader move toward more
standardized digital workflows.
That matters.
The government, payers, physicians, vendors and technology
companies may disagree about almost everything else.
But one fact is increasingly difficult to ignore:
Administrative friction is a healthcare problem.
Recent News: the billing fight is not going away
Today's healthcare headlines continue to demonstrate how
much financial friction remains between physicians, payers and patients.
On August 12, 2026, Axios reported renewed lobbying around
the federal No Surprises Act and its independent dispute-resolution
process. Providers and insurers remain sharply divided over how disputed
payments should be calculated and whether current data accurately represent the
system's impact.
This is not simply a political argument.
It is an operational signal.
When payment rules become contested, practices need stronger
data.
When reimbursement rules change, practices need better
visibility.
When payer behavior changes, practices need faster
detection.
When regulations evolve, manual workflows become more
expensive.
The lesson for clinic owners is not to predict which side of
every policy debate will win.
It is to build a practice capable of adapting when the rules
change.
Flexibility is now a revenue-cycle capability.
Another warning: reimbursement pressure does not
disappear
CMS's current physician-fee-schedule process is already
looking ahead to 2027, with proposed policies open for comment.
That means physician practices should not build their
economics around the assumption that reimbursement will always rise enough to
compensate for inefficiency.
It may not.
If payment pressure increases, the practice has two broad
choices.
Work harder.
Or reduce waste.
The first approach has a ceiling.
The second has an opportunity.
The hidden threat to independent medicine
Independent practices do not necessarily lose because they
provide inferior care.
They can lose because the economics of running the practice
become too complicated.
A physician can be clinically excellent and operationally
overwhelmed.
That creates an opening for consolidation.
When independent practices cannot manage:
Administrative costs.
Payer complexity.
Technology costs.
Staffing.
Collections.
Compliance.
Contracting.
Documentation.
They may eventually decide that selling is easier than
surviving.
That is not necessarily a clinical failure.
It is an infrastructure failure.
And if enough independent practices reach that point,
patients lose choices.
That is why revenue-cycle efficiency is not merely about
increasing practice profit.
It can also be about preserving independent access to
care.
Five things I would change tomorrow
1. Stop asking only about collections
Ask about collection friction.
How much work does it take to collect each dollar?
2. Stop celebrating low denial volume without examining
cause
A low denial rate can still hide serious financial leakage.
Look at dollars.
Look at preventability.
Look at repeat causes.
3. Stop hiring around broken workflows
Before adding another employee, identify why the work
exists.
Sometimes the answer is genuinely “we need more people.”
Sometimes it is:
“We created this work ourselves.”
4. Stop measuring software activity
A system completing 10,000 tasks is not automatically
valuable.
Measure what happened because of those tasks.
5. Stop treating physician time as free
This may be the most important.
If a physician spends an hour fixing an administrative
problem, that hour has economic value.
It also has human value.
Do not hide it.
The 30-day practice reset
You do not need a massive transformation project.
Start small.
Days 1–5: follow one dollar
Take a claim.
Follow it from:
Patient registration.
To encounter.
To documentation.
To coding.
To claim.
To payer.
To payment.
To posting.
To reconciliation.
Document every handoff.
You will learn more from one claim's journey than from
another generic billing presentation.
Days 6–10: find your recurring failures
Look at your last several months.
Identify the five most common denial causes.
Then identify the five most expensive.
They may not be the same.
Days 11–15: calculate preventability
For each major problem, ask:
Could we have prevented this?
If yes, where?
Registration?
Scheduling?
Authorization?
Documentation?
Coding?
Claim creation?
Payer configuration?
Days 16–20: calculate human cost
Estimate:
Staff hours.
Physician hours.
Manager hours.
Phone calls.
Portal logins.
Manual corrections.
Appeals.
Follow-ups.
Then put a dollar value on that time.
Days 21–25: fix one upstream problem
Do not fix everything.
Pick the highest-leverage issue.
Build a new workflow.
Assign ownership.
Define exceptions.
Days 26–30: measure again
Compare:
Denials.
Cash.
A/R.
Staff time.
Physician time.
Errors.
Patient complaints.
Then decide what to scale.
The metrics I would put on the wall
Every clinic is different.
But I would start with:
Clean claim rate
Preventable denial rate
Denial dollars
Days in A/R
A/R over 90 days
Net collection rate
Cost to collect
Claim submission lag
Payment turnaround
Administrative hours per 100 claims
And one metric most practices rarely track:
Physician hours spent on revenue-cycle work.
That number belongs on the dashboard.
The metric that matters most
If I could add only one question to every revenue-cycle
dashboard, it would be:
How much human attention did this process consume?
Because money tells you what happened financially.
Time tells you why.
A claim that generates $500 but consumes three hours of
staff work may be less valuable operationally than a $300 claim that requires
almost no intervention.
This is where healthcare needs to mature.
We need to measure friction, not just transactions.
Myth Buster
Myth: “The billing company owns the problem.”
No.
The billing company may manage the workflow.
The practice owns the outcome.
Myth: “More automation automatically means better
billing.”
No.
Bad automation can scale bad decisions.
Myth: “Every denial should be appealed.”
Not necessarily.
Sometimes the better investment is preventing the next 100
similar denials.
Myth: “AI will eliminate billing.”
Probably not.
The more realistic future is AI handling increasingly
complex administrative tasks while humans supervise exceptions, compliance,
judgment and relationships.
Myth: “Revenue cycle is purely financial.”
No.
It affects staffing, access, patient communication,
physician time, and practice sustainability.
Myth: “Independent practices cannot compete with large
health systems.”
They can.
But they need leverage.
Technology can provide some of that leverage if it is
designed around the realities of smaller practices.
The ethical line AI billing must not cross
There is a temptation in revenue-cycle technology to
optimize relentlessly.
More revenue.
Fewer write-offs.
Higher collections.
Faster payment.
But healthcare cannot reduce everything to optimization.
A legitimate claim should be paid accurately.
An illegitimate claim should not be manufactured into
legitimacy.
AI should never be used to justify:
Upcoding.
Unsupported documentation.
Unbundling.
Manipulation.
Misrepresentation.
Aggressive patient collection.
The goal is not to extract every possible dollar.
The goal is:
Accurate reimbursement for legitimate care.
That distinction protects patients.
It protects physicians.
And it protects the credibility of healthcare technology.
Legal and compliance considerations
Medical billing technology operates in a high-risk
environment.
A clinic considering automation should evaluate:
HIPAA compliance
Data security
Access controls
Business associate relationships
Audit trails
Coding compliance
Documentation integrity
Payer contracts
Fraud-and-abuse risk
Patient financial communications
State requirements
Human oversight
AI should not become a black box.
A practice needs to understand:
What information entered the system?
What rule was applied?
What recommendation was generated?
Who approved the action?
Can the decision be audited?
Can an error be corrected?
What happens when the system is uncertain?
Those questions should be answered before deployment, not
after an incident.
Health equity is hiding in the billing workflow
Here is another uncomfortable truth.
Administrative friction does not affect every patient
equally.
A financially comfortable patient may absorb an unexpected
$200 bill.
Another patient may not.
A patient with a flexible job may spend an hour on the
phone.
Another patient may lose wages by doing so.
A patient who speaks English fluently may navigate a
confusing explanation of benefits.
Another patient may struggle.
A patient with stable housing may receive every letter.
Another may not.
So when we improve billing, we should not only ask:
“Can we collect faster?”
We should also ask:
“Can we make the financial experience clearer and
fairer?”
That is where operational efficiency and patient-centered
care meet.
Why the best healthcare technology may become invisible
The most useful technology in medicine may not be the
technology physicians talk about most.
It may be the technology they stop noticing.
A system that quietly verifies information.
A workflow that catches an error before submission.
A system that identifies a payer change.
A tool that routes an exception to the right person.
A platform that tells a manager where cash is stuck.
An automated process that eliminates three manual steps.
None of these sound revolutionary.
That is the point.
The best infrastructure disappears into the workflow.
The patient sees a smoother experience.
The physician gets time back.
The staff sees fewer exceptions.
The owner sees more predictable operations.
That is innovation.
Why I founded OnnX
My interest in this problem comes from seeing the disconnect
between clinical work and administrative infrastructure.
Physicians create enormous value in the examination room.
But the information generated there has to travel through an
administrative maze before the practice gets paid.
Every handoff creates an opportunity for error.
Every disconnected system creates uncertainty.
Every preventable denial creates additional work.
My thesis behind OnnX is simple:
Healthcare billing should become more deterministic by
improving the quality and intelligence of the information upstream.
The goal is not to create another layer between physicians
and payers.
It is to reduce unnecessary layers.
For small and medium-sized physician-owned practices, that
distinction matters.
They do not need more complexity.
They need leverage.
The opportunity for healthcare founders
There is a lesson here for entrepreneurs.
Do not ask:
“Where can I put AI?”
Ask:
“Where is a human being repeatedly compensating for a
broken workflow?”
That is where the opportunity often lives.
Look for:
Repeated data entry.
Repeated verification.
Repeated phone calls.
Repeated portal searches.
Repeated corrections.
Repeated denials.
Repeated escalations.
Repeated reconciliation.
Repeated confusion.
Those repetitions are signals.
But there is another question founders should ask:
Why does the repetition exist?
If you do not understand that, you may automate the symptom.
The better company fixes the underlying workflow.
The future is not autonomous billing
At least, not in the simplistic sense.
The future is context-aware revenue infrastructure.
Systems that understand:
The patient.
The encounter.
The payer.
The contract.
The documentation.
The code.
The authorization.
The claim.
The denial.
The payment.
The exception.
And the next best action.
But sophisticated automation must be coupled with something
equally important:
knowing when to stop.
When confidence is low, escalate.
When information is missing, ask.
When a decision carries significant risk, require review.
When the data conflict, do not pretend they agree.
The future of healthcare AI will not be defined only by how
much it can do.
It will be defined by how intelligently it knows what it
should not do alone.
A different definition of innovation
Innovation is not always invention.
Sometimes innovation is subtraction.
Removing a form.
Removing a login.
Removing a handoff.
Removing duplicate entry.
Removing a denial.
Removing a phone call.
Removing an unnecessary approval.
Removing an unnecessary report.
Removing the need for the physician to intervene.
That is the kind of innovation independent practices need.
Less work. More care.
The question every physician-owner should ask
Not:
“What billing software are we using?”
Ask:
“How much of our billing process exists only because our
systems do not communicate?”
That question opens a very different conversation.
If the answer is “a lot,” you have found an opportunity.
The question every healthcare founder should ask
Not:
“What can our AI automate?”
Ask:
“What human attention can we return to healthcare?”
That is the better north star.
The question every healthcare executive should ask
Not:
“How much did we spend on administrative infrastructure?”
Ask:
“What did our administrative infrastructure make
possible?”
Did it give clinicians time?
Did it reduce patient friction?
Did it improve financial reliability?
Did it protect access?
Did it reduce preventable work?
If not, the system may be consuming resources rather than
creating capacity.
Three practical rules for 2026
Rule one: fix upstream
Do not wait for the denial.
Find the first place the information became wrong.
Rule two: automate the mechanical work
Let machines handle repetitive, rules-based processes where
appropriate.
Let humans handle judgment, exceptions and relationships.
Rule three: measure time
If technology saves $50,000 but creates 500 hours of new
work, the business case is incomplete.
If technology costs money but returns thousands of hours of
clinical and administrative capacity, the economics may look very different.
Time belongs on the balance sheet of healthcare
innovation.
The story we should remember
Ethan Hackney is not a metaphor.
He is a real six-year-old boy whose family is asking for
help.
That distinction matters.
We should not use a child's medical situation simply as a
marketing device.
His story deserves to remain about him.
About Ethan.
About Jenny.
About a family facing something no parent wants to face.
About the possibility that a stranger may become the person
who changes a child's future.
But his story can also remind us why healthcare exists.
Not to create more workflows.
Not to generate more claims.
Not to produce more dashboards.
Not to maximize administrative activity.
To help people.
Every system we build should be judged against that
standard.
Final Thoughts: We are solving the wrong problem
Healthcare does not have a shortage of intelligence.
It has a shortage of well-directed human attention.
We have brilliant physicians.
Dedicated nurses.
Exceptional technicians.
Committed practice managers.
Hard-working billers.
Caregivers who sacrifice sleep.
Families who search the country for donors.
Communities that share a child's story.
And increasingly powerful technology.
Yet we still make these people spend too much of their
limited time navigating systems that were supposed to help them.
That is the contradiction.
Ethan's family is looking for a kidney.
A kidney cannot be automated into existence.
But the coordination surrounding care can be improved.
A physician cannot be replaced by a billing algorithm.
But unnecessary billing work can be reduced.
A nurse cannot be cloned.
But repetitive administrative tasks can be redesigned.
A caregiver cannot be given more hours in the day.
But healthcare can stop wasting the hours they already have.
That is the real opportunity.
Do not ask how much technology healthcare can absorb.
Ask how much unnecessary work healthcare can eliminate.
Do not ask how many transactions your system can process.
Ask how much human attention it can return.
Do not build technology merely to make healthcare more
digital.
Build it to make healthcare more human.**
Get Involved: Change the Conversation
Here is the question I want to leave with physicians and
clinic owners:
What is the one administrative task you would eliminate
tomorrow if you could?
Prior authorization?
Eligibility?
Coding?
Denial management?
Patient collections?
Payer follow-up?
Referral coordination?
Something else?
Tell me in the comments.
Your answer may reveal a problem another physician is
struggling with right now.
Share this article with a physician, practice owner,
administrator, or healthcare founder who should be part of this conversation.
And if this perspective resonates, repost it.
Not to promote another technology.
But to start a better conversation about what healthcare
should be optimizing for.
Get involved. Raise your hand. Step into the
conversation. Share what you have learned. Help shape the future of independent
medicine.
Because healthcare does not need another generation of
people working harder to compensate for broken systems.
It needs better systems.
About the Author
Dr. Daniel Cham is a physician, entrepreneur, and
healthcare technology consultant focused on the intersection of medical
practice, healthcare operations, medical billing, artificial intelligence, and
innovation.
He is the founder of OnnX, an AI-powered medical
billing SaaS initiative designed around a simple premise: small and
medium-sized physician-owned practices should not need layers of unnecessary
administrative complexity to receive accurate and timely reimbursement for
legitimate care.
Dr. Cham writes about the practical side of healthcare
transformation, with particular interest in physician time, revenue-cycle
performance, workflow design, healthcare AI, and the future of independent
medical practice.
His perspective is shaped by the belief that technology
should serve clinicians rather than create another job for them.
Connect with Dr. Daniel Cham on LinkedIn:
Disclaimer
This article is intended solely for general educational
and informational purposes. It does not provide medical, legal, coding,
compliance, reimbursement, or financial advice.
Healthcare regulations, payer requirements, contracts,
and billing practices can change and may differ according to specialty,
jurisdiction, payer, and individual circumstances.
Readers should consult appropriately qualified
professionals for advice relating to their specific clinical, legal,
compliance, operational, or financial situation.
Continue the Conversation
Healthcare is changing quickly, but the most important
questions remain remarkably human.
How do we give physicians more time?
How do we reduce unnecessary administrative work?
How do we make healthcare easier to navigate?
How do we build technology that strengthens rather than
weakens human connection?
Explore more perspectives, practical strategies, and
conversations about healthcare operations, innovation, medical technology,
entrepreneurship, and the future of medicine.
Knowledge is the beginning. Understanding creates
leverage. Action creates change.
Visit the personal website:
Listen to the podcast:
Watch and subscribe on YouTube:
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Explore More
For physicians and clinic owners looking for practical
material, visit the Featured section of Dr. Cham's LinkedIn profile for
available resources and downloads.
No complicated funnel. No unnecessary barrier. Just
practical information you can use.
Explore
Dr. Cham's LinkedIn Featured section
If this perspective resonates, repost it.
Another physician may be struggling with the same
administrative problem.
Another clinic owner may be questioning whether there is a
better way.
Another healthcare founder may be building the technology
that makes the better way possible.
One conversation can expose the problem. Thousands of
conversations can change the standard.
Three References
1. Ethan Hackney and his family's public donor appeal.
Jenny Hackney has publicly shared that her six-year-old son Ethan has lived
with a serious kidney condition throughout his life and that the family is now
seeking a living kidney donor; community posts identify Ethan as being from
Herring Cove, Nova Scotia.
Public appeal and family statement
2. CMS electronic prior authorization initiative. CMS
describes its continuing work toward electronic prior authorization and
standardized digital information exchange, reflecting the broader movement to
reduce administrative friction in healthcare.
CMS Electronic Prior Authorization
3. Current physician payment and administrative policy
environment. CMS's current Physician Fee Schedule materials show that
physician payment policy and administrative requirements remain active areas of
change heading into 2027.
#HealthcareInnovation #HumanCenteredHealthcare
#PatientExperience #PhysicianLeadership #MedicalBilling #HealthcareAI
#RevenueCycleManagement #HealthcareOperations #IndependentPractice
#HealthcareTechnology #OnnX
