What his story reveals about patient trust, system reliability, administrative burden, and why healthcare technology should give physicians back the attention patients need.
“The relentless focus on productivity metrics has been
associated with physician burnout, emotional exhaustion, moral distress and
workforce attrition, all of which may threaten patient access to timely,
high-quality care.” — American
Medical Association, 2026
A physician's contrarian take on patient trust,
administrative burden, medical billing and the systems we ask clinicians to
depend on
The uncomfortable question
What if the biggest problem in healthcare isn't that
physicians aren't working hard enough?
What if they're working inside systems that require them to
work too hard?
That distinction matters.
And a recent story involving actor Robert Carradine
makes that distinction impossible to ignore.
Carradine, known for Revenge of the Nerds and Lizzie
McGuire, voluntarily entered UCLA's Resnick Neuropsychiatric Hospital
in January 2026 after experiencing suicidal thoughts.
He went there because he needed help.
He trusted a healthcare institution to provide it.
Carradine later died on February 23, 2026, at age 71.
His children — Ever Carradine, Marika Reed Carradine and
Ian Alexander Carradine — have filed a lawsuit against The Regents of
the University of California, alleging wrongful death, elder abuse and
neglect.
According to the complaint, the family alleges that UCLA
staff failed to follow important safety procedures, including allegations
concerning a belt, required observation checks and the accuracy of medical
documentation.
Those are allegations, not established facts.
The case will have to be decided through the legal process.
UCLA Health has not publicly accepted the family's account.
But the story raises a question much bigger than the
lawsuit:
What happens when a patient trusts a healthcare system to
do the small things correctly?
Because that is what healthcare ultimately is.
Not one heroic physician.
Not one brilliant diagnosis.
Not one extraordinary surgeon.
A system of thousands of small things.
A medication is reconciled.
A result is reviewed.
A referral is transmitted.
A patient is observed.
A note is documented.
A claim is submitted.
A denial is investigated.
A payment is reconciled.
A follow-up happens.
And another human being assumes someone else did the thing
that needed to be done.
That is where healthcare becomes interesting.
And dangerous.
Because systems don't fail only when people don't care.
They also fail when good people are forced to work inside
bad systems.
That is the part of this story I want physicians and clinic
owners to think about.
Not the celebrity.
Not the lawsuit.
The system.
The healthcare industry has a strange obsession
We love asking:
How can physicians become more efficient?
We ask doctors to see more patients.
Document faster.
Code accurately.
Complete prior authorizations.
Respond to messages.
Review results.
Meet quality measures.
Close charts.
Fight denials.
Monitor inboxes.
Stay current.
Avoid burnout.
And somehow remain fully present with every patient.
Then we act surprised when physicians say:
"I don't have enough time."
Maybe the problem isn't physician productivity.
Maybe the problem is system productivity.
That is a very different conversation.
And it is one healthcare leaders should be having.
Here's my hot take
Healthcare doesn't have a physician shortage nearly as
much as it has a physician-attention shortage.
We have doctors.
We have nurses.
We have medical assistants.
We have practice managers.
We have billing professionals.
What we don't have is unlimited human attention.
And healthcare keeps spending that attention on work that
often shouldn't require it.
A physician spends five minutes on a payer issue.
A nurse spends ten minutes finding a missing authorization.
An office manager spends thirty minutes reconciling a claim.
A biller spends twenty minutes correcting data that already
existed somewhere else.
Nobody thinks much about any individual event.
But multiply it by:
100 patients.
1,000 claims.
10,000 encounters.
12 months.
Suddenly we're not talking about administrative
"tasks."
We're talking about a second healthcare workforce whose
job is fixing the first workforce's infrastructure.
That is expensive.
The Carradine story isn't really about celebrities
That's what makes it useful.
Robert Carradine could have been almost anyone.
A father.
A grandfather.
A teacher.
A factory worker.
A retired engineer.
A physician.
A patient.
The emotional core is not his celebrity.
It is this:
A human being recognized that he needed help and walked
into a healthcare institution expecting the institution to help him.
That is an extraordinary act of trust.
Patients do this every day.
They trust the medication list.
They trust the lab result.
They trust the referral.
They trust the diagnosis.
They trust the nurse.
They trust the physician.
They trust the hospital.
They trust that somebody is watching.
And they trust that if something goes wrong, somebody will
notice.
Healthcare therefore has an unusual responsibility.
The patient should not have to understand the system in
order to be safe inside it.
Now bring that idea into your medical practice
Your patient doesn't care which billing vendor you use.
They don't care which clearinghouse processes the claim.
They don't care which payer portal your staff logs into.
They don't care which spreadsheet contains the A/R.
They don't care which employee is responsible for
eligibility verification.
They care about whether their care works.
But here is where things become uncomfortable.
The financial health of the practice affects the care
environment.
If claims are repeatedly denied:
Cash flow suffers.
If cash flow suffers:
Hiring becomes harder.
If hiring becomes harder:
Staffing becomes tighter.
If staffing becomes tighter:
Workload rises.
If workload rises:
Administrative burden rises.
If administrative burden rises:
Physician attention gets fragmented.
And when physician attention gets fragmented, the quality of
the entire practice environment can suffer.
This isn't a theoretical connection.
It is a systems problem.
Revenue cycle management is part of care infrastructure.
Most physicians were never taught to think about it that
way.
The $1,000 problem physicians don't see
Here's an example.
Suppose a practice loses $1,000 because of a preventable
denial.
The obvious question is:
"How do we recover the $1,000?"
The better question is:
"Why did the $1,000 become recoverable in the first
place?"
Maybe the claim lacked authorization.
Maybe eligibility was wrong.
Maybe documentation didn't support the service.
Maybe the payer changed its policy.
Maybe the claim was submitted incorrectly.
Maybe information existed in the EHR but didn't flow into
the billing system.
Maybe somebody simply missed a step.
The denial is the visible symptom.
The actual problem happened earlier.
That is one of the most important concepts in revenue-cycle
management.
The denial is often not the failure. It is the
notification that the failure already happened.
This changes how we should think about medical billing
Traditional billing asks:
Did we get paid?
Better billing asks:
Why didn't we get paid?
Intelligent revenue-cycle management asks:
Why did this claim become vulnerable in the first place?
And truly preventive revenue-cycle management asks:
How do we stop the next 500 claims from becoming
vulnerable for the same reason?
That is the evolution.
From:
collection
to
recovery
to
prevention
to
prediction
That is where AI can become genuinely useful.
But here's the contrarian part about AI
I am a physician entrepreneur building healthcare
technology.
So I have every reason to tell you that AI is the answer.
I'm not going to.
Because sometimes AI is not the answer.
Sometimes the problem is a bad workflow.
Sometimes the problem is missing data.
Sometimes the problem is a payer rule.
Sometimes the problem is poor interoperability.
Sometimes the problem is simply that nobody owns the
handoff.
And if you automate a broken workflow, you don't necessarily
get an intelligent workflow.
You may simply get:
a faster broken workflow.
That is one of the most dangerous misconceptions in
healthcare technology.
Faster isn't necessarily better
Imagine a billing system that can process 100,000 claims an
hour.
Sounds impressive.
Now imagine it makes the same mistake on 10 percent of those
claims.
Congratulations.
You've automated your mistake.
Healthcare needs to stop treating speed as synonymous with
intelligence.
The better question is:
How reliably does the system know when it is right?
And more importantly:
How reliably does it know when it may be wrong?
That second question is enormously important.
A trustworthy healthcare AI system needs an exception
strategy.
It needs to know when to stop.
When to escalate.
When to ask.
When to defer.
When to show its reasoning.
When to bring a human into the loop.
Three expert lessons healthcare leaders should pay
attention to
Expert perspective #1: Atul Gawande — don't confuse
expertise with immunity to error
Surgeon and writer Atul Gawande helped popularize the
medical checklist not because physicians are unintelligent.
Quite the opposite.
Checklists recognize a fundamental truth:
Complex systems exceed human memory.
A brilliant surgeon can forget a step.
An experienced nurse can miss something during a chaotic
shift.
An excellent biller can overlook a payer-specific
requirement.
A physician can document something perfectly and still have
the information fail to reach the billing workflow.
The lesson isn't:
"Train people harder."
The lesson is:
Design systems that support people when human attention
is inevitably imperfect.
Expert perspective #2: Don Berwick — stop treating every
failure as an individual failure
Healthcare quality leader Donald Berwick has spent
decades arguing for systems-based improvement.
This matters because healthcare has a deeply ingrained
habit:
Something goes wrong.
Find the person.
Retrain the person.
Write a policy.
Move on.
But what if the person wasn't the real problem?
Suppose an authorization is missed.
The traditional response:
"The staff needs to remember."
A systems response:
"Why did the workflow depend on someone
remembering?"
That is a much better question.
If the same mistake happens repeatedly, you shouldn't keep
blaming the person.
Fix the environment that produces the mistake.
Expert perspective #3: Lucian Leape — human error is
often predictable
Patient-safety pioneer Lucian Leape helped move
medicine away from the simplistic idea that errors are primarily the result of
bad individuals.
The deeper insight is that predictable failures often emerge
from predictable environments.
That has enormous relevance to healthcare operations.
If a claim fails repeatedly because information is trapped
in another system, don't keep telling employees to "be more careful."
If a payer requirement changes and nobody knows, don't
simply blame the biller.
If a practice has five different systems that contain five
different versions of patient information, don't blame the person who
accidentally chooses the wrong one.
Ask:
Why was the wrong choice so easy to make?
What these three experts have in common
Gawande.
Berwick.
Leape.
Different careers.
Different approaches.
Same fundamental lesson:
Good people need good systems.
That should be printed above every healthcare operations
department in America.
The administrative burden problem is getting harder to
ignore
MGMA's 2026 Regulatory Burden Report surveyed more than 230
medical groups, with 60% of respondents identifying as independent
practices. The organization highlights prior authorization, Medicare
Advantage requirements and quality reporting among the major burdens diverting
resources away from patient care.
That matters because independent practices have less room
for waste.
A giant health system can sometimes absorb another
administrative layer.
A six-physician practice cannot.
Every unnecessary process has a real human cost.
Every duplicated task consumes time.
Every preventable denial consumes staff capacity.
Every payer portal creates another login.
Every disconnected system creates another handoff.
Every handoff creates another opportunity for information to
disappear.
And every disappearing piece of information eventually
becomes someone's problem.
Usually the person closest to the patient.
The physician becomes the middleware
Here's a phrase I wish healthcare leaders would use more
often:
Human middleware.
Middleware is software that connects systems.
But healthcare has created another kind.
Humans.
A medical assistant takes information from one system and
puts it into another.
A nurse interprets a message and translates it into a task.
A physician rewrites documentation because a payer requires
something different.
A billing specialist searches multiple systems to
reconstruct what happened.
An office manager reconciles conflicting numbers.
These people aren't necessarily doing high-value clinical
work.
They're connecting broken infrastructure.
We are paying humans to perform integrations that
technology should increasingly perform.
That is a massive opportunity.
What OnnX is trying to change
This is the philosophy behind OnnX.
Not:
"Let's replace the biller."
Not:
"Let's put an AI chatbot on your revenue cycle."
Not:
"Let's make claims move faster."
The larger idea is:
What if a medical practice could understand its revenue
cycle as clearly as it understands its patient schedule?
What if the practice could see:
Where claims are failing.
Why they're failing.
Which problems are recurring.
Which problems are preventable.
Which claims need human attention.
Which payer behaviors are changing.
Where money is sitting.
Where staff time is being consumed.
And what should happen next.
That's not simply automation.
That's visibility.
The real enemy isn't the billing company
This is another place where I want to challenge conventional
thinking.
Physicians sometimes say:
"Our billing company is the problem."
Sometimes it is.
But not always.
There are excellent billing companies staffed by talented
professionals.
The deeper problem is often that nobody has end-to-end
visibility.
The billing company sees the claim.
The EHR sees the encounter.
The payer sees the adjudication.
The physician sees the patient.
The practice manager sees the bank account.
Everybody sees a piece.
Nobody sees the whole picture.
Fragmentation is the problem.
And fragmentation is where money disappears
Think about what happens to one claim.
The patient schedules.
Eligibility is checked.
The encounter occurs.
The physician documents.
Coding happens.
The claim is created.
The claim goes to a clearinghouse.
The payer adjudicates.
A response returns.
Someone posts the payment.
A denial enters a queue.
Someone investigates.
Someone appeals.
Someone follows up.
That is not one process.
It is a chain.
And every chain has weak links.
The question isn't:
"Who made the mistake?"
The better question is:
"Where did information lose fidelity?"
The overlooked metric: rework
Physicians know revenue.
Administrators know collections.
Billing companies know claims.
But one of the most revealing metrics is often ignored:
Rework.
How many times did someone touch the same claim?
How many times did someone reopen the same account?
How many times did someone enter the same information?
How many times did someone call the payer?
How many times did someone correct something that should
have been correct the first time?
Rework is expensive.
And unlike a salary, it often doesn't appear as a separate
line item.
It hides inside payroll.
It hides inside overtime.
It hides inside physician frustration.
It hides inside delayed collections.
It hides inside burnout.
Rework is the shadow cost of bad infrastructure.
Five questions every clinic owner should ask this month
1. Where are we losing money before we even know there is
a problem?
Look upstream.
2. What are our five largest recurring denial categories?
Not the five largest individual denials.
The five largest patterns.
3. How much staff time is spent fixing preventable
problems?
Actually estimate it.
4. Which information is being entered more than once?
Duplicate entry is a signal.
5. What does our billing vendor know that we don't?
If the answer is "almost everything," you have a
visibility problem.
The 30-day physician practice challenge
You don't need a multimillion-dollar transformation project.
Try this.
Week 1: Observe
Choose one claim type.
Follow 20 claims.
Document every handoff.
Don't judge.
Just observe.
Week 2: Categorize
Put every failure into one of these categories:
Data
Eligibility
Authorization
Documentation
Coding
Payer
Submission
Payment
Follow-up
Unknown
You will probably find a pattern.
Week 3: Fix one upstream cause
Pick the largest preventable category.
Don't try to solve everything.
Solve one thing.
Week 4: Measure
Compare:
denial rate
days to submission
days to payment
staff touches
rework
A/R
Then ask:
Did the workflow actually improve?
If yes, scale it.
If not, learn why.
Don't automate until you understand the workflow
This may be the most important practical advice in the
article.
Map first.
Measure second.
Automate third.
Too many healthcare organizations reverse the order.
They buy software.
Then ask:
"What are we going to do with it?"
That is backwards.
Technology should enter the workflow after the problem is
understood.
The AI hierarchy I would use
Not every task deserves the same level of automation.
Level 1: Automate
Use software when the rule is clear.
Examples:
Eligibility checks.
Duplicate detection.
Data validation.
Basic claim status.
Level 2: Assist
Use AI when interpretation is useful but human oversight
remains important.
Examples:
Denial categorization.
Documentation comparison.
Payer-rule summarization.
Work-queue prioritization.
Level 3: Escalate
Use AI to identify cases that need expert review.
Examples:
Conflicting documentation.
Unusual payer behavior.
Potential compliance issues.
Ambiguous coding.
Level 4: Human decision
Keep the final decision with an accountable professional
when the stakes or uncertainty warrant it.
That is not an AI failure.
That is good system design.
The myth of the "fully automated" practice
I don't believe in it.
At least not in the way the phrase is often marketed.
Healthcare is not Amazon checkout.
Patients aren't products.
Clinical documentation isn't a shipping label.
Payers aren't uniform.
Rules change.
People make exceptions.
Contracts differ.
Clinical circumstances matter.
There will always be edge cases.
The goal isn't to eliminate humans.
The goal is to stop wasting humans on predictable work.
That is a much more realistic vision.
Myth buster: "More technology means less work"
Not automatically.
Poorly implemented technology can create more work.
Another login.
Another dashboard.
Another notification.
Another queue.
Another integration.
Another system that requires training.
Technology can reduce administrative burden.
Or it can digitize administrative burden.
Those are very different outcomes.
Myth buster: "Our denial rate tells us
everything"
It doesn't.
You can have a low denial rate and still have substantial
leakage through:
underpayments,
missed charges,
incorrect contracts,
slow payment,
credentialing problems,
coding gaps,
patient balances,
or services never submitted.
Look beyond denials.
Myth buster: "The physician shouldn't care about
billing"
Physicians don't need to become billers.
But they should understand the economics of their practice.
Why?
Because the economics eventually influence:
staffing,
access,
hours,
technology,
services,
and sustainability.
Financial literacy is not selling out.
It is stewardship.
Myth buster: "Independent practice can't
compete"
I disagree.
Independent practices have one enormous advantage:
They can move faster.
A small practice can change a workflow in a week.
A giant system may need six committees.
The opportunity is to use that agility intelligently.
Don't imitate the bureaucracy of large systems.
Build a lean operating system.
What does patient safety have to do with billing?
Everything and nothing.
Let's be precise.
A billing error is not equivalent to a clinical safety
event.
We should never trivialize patient harm by making that
comparison.
But both reveal a common systems principle:
When healthcare depends on humans remembering,
transferring and documenting critical information perfectly across complex
workflows, failures become inevitable.
The solution isn't to blame the human.
The solution is to improve the system.
That is the bridge.
Legal considerations
Healthcare automation creates real legal responsibilities.
Practices need to think about:
HIPAA
privacy
security
Business Associate Agreements
coding compliance
documentation integrity
payer contracts
audit trails
access controls
records retention
fraud and abuse risk
false claims exposure
And one issue deserves special attention:
Do not allow automation to manufacture certainty.
An AI system should never invent clinical documentation to
support a claim.
It should never encourage inappropriate upcoding.
It should never conceal uncertainty.
And it should never make it impossible to determine who
approved an important action.
The more automation you introduce, the more important governance
becomes.
Ethical considerations
The ethical question isn't:
"Can we automate this?"
It is:
"What happens to the patient if we automate this
badly?"
That changes the conversation.
A billing system can affect patient statements.
A documentation system can affect reimbursement.
A scheduling system can affect access.
A denial system can affect whether a patient receives a
service.
So operational technology is not morally neutral.
The closer technology gets to patient access, the higher the
standard should be.
The economics of physician attention
Let's make this concrete.
Suppose a physician spends just 30 minutes per day dealing
with administrative problems that could reasonably be reduced.
That's 2.5 hours a week.
Approximately 10 hours a month.
More than 120 hours a year.
For one physician.
Now imagine a ten-physician practice.
That's more than 1,200 physician hours a year.
Those hours have economic value.
But their clinical value may be even greater.
What could those physicians have done with that time?
Seen patients.
Called families.
Reviewed complex cases.
Mentored staff.
Taken a break.
Gone home.
Been with their children.
Sometimes the most valuable ROI from healthcare technology
is not another dollar collected.
It is an hour of human attention returned to a physician.
The question I want healthcare founders to answer
Not:
"How intelligent is your AI?"
Ask:
"How much human attention does your product
return?"
That is a much harder question.
And a much more meaningful one.
If your technology saves 30 seconds but creates three new
workflows, it failed.
If it processes a million transactions but nobody
understands the exceptions, it failed.
If it generates recommendations but increases cognitive
load, it failed.
Technology should make the healthcare worker's job simpler,
not merely more digital.
What I would measure if I were evaluating OnnX
I wouldn't start with the AI model.
I'd start with outcomes.
Reduction in preventable denials
Reduction in rework
Reduction in manual touches
Reduction in days to submission
Reduction in days to payment
Improvement in first-pass acceptance
Improvement in net collection rate
Staff time recovered
Physician time protected
Exception accuracy
Auditability
Those are the numbers that matter.
Not how many AI agents you have.
Not how many tokens you process.
Not how impressive the demo looks.
A better definition of healthcare innovation
Healthcare innovation is often presented as:
new technology + old workflow.
I think that is insufficient.
Real innovation is:
new technology + redesigned workflow + measurable outcome
+ human accountability.
Take away any one of those pieces and you may have a
product.
You don't necessarily have an improvement.
The future isn't AI replacing physicians
It is more interesting than that.
The future is AI removing the administrative obstacles that
prevent physicians from practicing medicine well.
That means:
Less searching.
Less copying.
Less re-entering.
Less chasing.
Less guessing.
Less waiting.
Less repetitive documentation.
Less manual reconciliation.
More attention.
More judgment.
More conversation.
More care.
That is the future I want.
What healthcare leaders may be missing
Everyone is racing to build the smartest AI.
I think we should also race to build the most trustworthy
systems.
Because healthcare doesn't have a shortage of information.
It has a shortage of:
reliable information flow.
The data exists.
It is just scattered.
The authorization is somewhere.
The documentation is somewhere.
The claim is somewhere.
The payer response is somewhere.
The payment is somewhere.
The problem isn't always intelligence.
Sometimes it is coordination.
That is why the next generation of healthcare technology may
look less like a brilliant robot and more like extremely good infrastructure.
Quiet.
Invisible.
Reliable.
Boring.
And incredibly valuable.
The most provocative idea in this article
Here it is:
The best healthcare technology may be technology nobody
notices.
Nobody celebrates a system because a claim didn't get
denied.
Nobody posts on LinkedIn because an authorization was
correctly identified before the patient arrived.
Nobody writes a press release because a billing workflow
didn't require a human to re-enter information.
But those quiet successes matter.
The best infrastructure is often invisible.
You notice it when it fails.
And that brings us back to Robert Carradine
His story is painful precisely because healthcare is
supposed to be a place of trust.
According to reporting on the lawsuit, Carradine's family
alleges that he voluntarily sought care at UCLA's Resnick Neuropsychiatric
Hospital and that critical safety processes were not followed.
Again:
Those allegations remain allegations.
But regardless of how the litigation ultimately resolves,
the story forces healthcare leaders to confront an uncomfortable truth.
A policy sitting in a binder isn't safety.
A protocol nobody can reliably execute isn't safety.
A checkbox isn't safety.
A documented process that doesn't reflect reality isn't
safety.
Reliability is safety.
And that principle extends throughout healthcare.
The same principle applies to your revenue cycle
A billing policy sitting in a manual isn't revenue-cycle
control.
A payer rule nobody knows about isn't operational
intelligence.
A denial report generated 60 days later isn't prevention.
A dashboard nobody reads isn't visibility.
A billing vendor you cannot audit isn't transparency.
A claim that gets paid after three appeals isn't necessarily
a success.
Maybe it is.
Maybe it is evidence of a problem that should have been
prevented.
The mature question is:
What happened upstream?
Your practice doesn't need more heroics
This is perhaps the most important message for physicians.
You don't need to become a better human.
You don't need your office manager to work another Saturday.
You don't need your biller to remember another 400 payer
rules.
You don't need another heroic effort.
You need a system that makes heroic effort less necessary.
That's what good infrastructure does.
Start here
Tomorrow, ask your office manager one question:
"What is the most ridiculous thing your team has to
do every day that you believe should be automated or eliminated?"
Then listen.
Don't defend the process.
Don't explain why it exists.
Don't say:
"That's just how healthcare works."
Write it down.
Then ask:
"How often does this happen?"
Then:
"What happens if we don't do it?"
Then:
"Why can't the system do it?"
That conversation may reveal more about your practice than
another expensive consultant's report.
A simple operating philosophy for independent practices
I would summarize it this way:
Eliminate before automating.
Don't automate unnecessary work.
Automate before hiring.
If a predictable task can be safely automated, don't build a
permanent manual process around it.
Measure before claiming improvement.
Baseline first.
Escalate uncertainty.
Don't force AI to guess.
Preserve human accountability.
Someone should always own the outcome.
Make data visible.
You should understand your own practice.
Fix upstream.
Don't spend all your energy cleaning up downstream failures.
What OnnX ultimately stands for
For me, this isn't really about medical billing.
Billing is simply where I started.
The larger idea is healthcare infrastructure that works
for the people actually providing care.
Technology should not create another layer between physician
and patient.
It should remove layers.
It should not hide complexity.
It should absorb complexity.
It should not require clinicians to become software
engineers.
It should make the software adapt to the clinical
environment.
And it should not replace judgment.
It should protect judgment for the moments when judgment
matters most.
Final Thoughts: Stop Asking Physicians to Be the System
Maybe healthcare's biggest hidden problem isn't
incompetence.
Maybe it's overdependence on human heroics.
We ask physicians to remember.
We ask nurses to catch.
We ask medical assistants to reconcile.
We ask office managers to chase.
We ask billers to appeal.
We ask patients to navigate.
Then we call the system "efficient."
It isn't.
A system that requires extraordinary people to compensate
for ordinary failures is not a high-performing system.
It's a fragile one.
The better system is different.
It catches problems early.
It makes information visible.
It routes exceptions intelligently.
It automates predictable work.
It preserves human judgment.
And when something goes wrong, it makes the failure easier
to understand.
That is what healthcare technology should aspire to.
Not replacing the people we trust.
Building systems worthy of their trust.
Get Involved
So here is the question I want to put directly to physicians
and clinic owners:
What is the one administrative process in your practice
that everyone has accepted as "normal" even though it makes
absolutely no sense?
Don't give me the politically correct answer.
Give me the real one.
Tell me in the comments.
If this article made you think about a problem differently, share
it with another physician or clinic owner who is dealing with the same
friction.
And if you believe healthcare can be redesigned around
clinicians rather than asking clinicians to constantly adapt to the system, join
the conversation.
The future of healthcare isn't something that happens to
physicians.
Physicians should help build it.
Raise your hand. Question the workflow. Start with one
broken process.
About the Author
Dr. Daniel Cham is a physician, medical consultant
and healthcare entrepreneur working at the intersection of medical
technology, healthcare management and medical billing.
He is the founder of OnnX, an AI-powered medical
billing platform focused on helping small and medium-sized medical practices
reduce administrative friction, improve revenue-cycle visibility and spend less
time navigating fragmented billing workflows.
His work focuses on a practical question:
How can technology give physicians more control over the
systems surrounding patient care?
Connect with Dr. Cham on LinkedIn:
Disclaimer
This article is intended for general educational and
informational purposes only. It does not constitute medical, legal, coding,
compliance, financial or other professional advice. Healthcare professionals
and organizations should consult appropriately qualified professionals
regarding their particular circumstances.
References to the Robert Carradine litigation describe
allegations reported in publicly available sources. Those allegations have not
been adjudicated and should not be interpreted as established findings of fact
or liability.
Continue the Conversation
Healthcare is changing too quickly for any one discipline to
solve its problems alone.
The most interesting work is happening where medicine,
technology, operations, economics and human experience intersect.
I share practical observations, healthcare strategy and
lessons from building at that intersection.
Knowledge starts the conversation. Practical insight
moves it forward.
Explore more:
Listen
to the podcast on Spotify
Knowledge drives progress. Start your journey here.
For a free resource, visit the Featured section of my
LinkedIn profile. No signup required.
If this perspective resonates with you, repost it so
another physician, practice owner or healthcare leader can join the
conversation.
#Healthcare #Physicians #MedicalPractice
#HealthcareInnovation #MedicalBilling #RevenueCycleManagement #HealthcareAI
#PatientSafety #PhysicianBurnout #IndependentPractice #HealthTech
#HealthcareLeadership #MedicalTechnology #PracticeManagement #AIinHealthcare
#HealthcareOperations
Three references
1. Robert Carradine's family lawsuit against UCLA.
The Los Angeles Times reports that Carradine's family filed a
wrongful-death lawsuit against UCLA's governing body, alleging his death
following psychiatric hospitalization was preventable.
Read
the Los Angeles Times report
2. MGMA's 2026 Regulatory Burden Report. The report
draws on responses from more than 230 medical groups and identifies prior
authorization, Medicare Advantage requirements and quality reporting among
major burdens diverting practice resources from patient care.
Read
the MGMA 2026 Regulatory Burden Report
3. AMA analysis of 2026 physician payment and practice
economics. The AMA reports that Medicare physician payment has risen only
about 10% from 2001 to 2026 while the cost of running a medical practice
increased 63%, illustrating the financial pressure facing physician practices.
One final thought
Robert Carradine's story is about a patient who trusted a
healthcare system.
Your patients do the same thing every day.
They trust that the right information will be there.
They trust that someone will notice.
They trust that the system will work.
They trust you.
The question isn't whether healthcare has enough good
people.
It is whether we have built systems good people can
trust.
That is the healthcare technology challenge worth solving.
