Hospitals today face growing financial pressure, staffing shortages, increasingly complex payers, and rising administrative demands. According to Keith Fulmer, Chief Technology and Innovation Officer (CTIO) at Brundage Group, technology improves efficiency by automating tasks, reducing denials through early identification, and strengthening revenue cycle performance without adding burden to clinicians.
What Role Does Technology Play in Hospital Revenue Cycle Operations?
“Technology is the connective tissue behind what our clinical experts do every day,” says Fulmer.
Brundage Group uses healthcare analytics and workflow technology that automatically identifies missed documentation and coding opportunities, preventing revenue leakage for hospitals.
The organization’s technology integrates with electronic health records (EHRs) and operational workflows, combining clinical, coding, and financial data into a single view to identify areas in need of attention.
Our tools highlight mismatches between clinical care and reimbursement, Fulmer explains. This enables physician advisors and Clinical Documentation Integrity (CDI) specialists to prioritize their efforts for greater impact.
What Is the Mid-Revenue Cycle?
The mid-revenue cycle is the stage between patient care and reimbursement, during which hospitals manage clinical documentation, coding accuracy, utilization review, and revenue integrity processes.
“It’s where what the clinician did at the bedside gets translated into accurate documentation, coding, and ultimately a clean claim,” says Fulmer.
Accurate documentation during the mid-revenue cycle is essential because it affects:
Weak documentation or a missed code doesn’t just create denials, it under-represents the complexity of the patient and the care the hospital actually delivered.
How Does Workflow Automation Improve Hospital Operations?
Healthcare workflow automation reduces manual steps, streamlines hospital operations, and directly improves efficiency by allowing staff to focus on complex tasks.
Brundage Group uses intelligent workflows to automate:
- Case prioritization
- Query routing
- Worklist generation
- Opportunities
- Risks
Intelligent workflows remove repetitive manual work so experts can focus on judgment-based decisions.
“Every hour we give back to a CDI specialist or Physician Advisor is an hour spent on the cases that matter most,” Fulmer explains.
How Can Healthcare Technology Support Clinicians Without Adding Complexity?
Fulmer believes healthcare technology should integrate into existing workflows rather than force clinicians to change their workflows.
“If a tool requires a physician to leave their workflow or log into another system, it’s already failed,” he says.
Brundage Group focuses on embedding technology inside the systems clinicians already use so they can access the right information at the right time.
“Good technology should feel like a quiet assistant, not another inbox,” Fulmer explains.
Why Are Fragmented Healthcare Systems Inefficient?
One of the biggest operational challenges hospitals face is fragmentation between systems.
“A single patient encounter touches EHR systems, coding, CDI, utilization review, billing, and multiple other platforms that often don’t communicate effectively,” Fulmer says.
Disconnected systems create:
- Duplicate work
- Incomplete information
- Delayed decisions
- Administrative inefficiencies
- Increased labor costs
“The inefficiency isn’t in the people,” Fulmer explains. “It’s in the gaps between systems.”
Fragmentation is not the only issue hindering hospital operations; legacy systems also struggle to keep pace with current demands.
Many hospital systems were built for a healthcare environment that no longer exists.
“A lot of hospital infrastructure was designed for fee-for-service environments with simpler payer requirements and lower data complexity,” Fulmer says.
Today, hospitals face:
- Larger data volumes
- More payer scrutiny
- Complex reimbursement models
- Increased regulatory requirements
- Faster operational demands
“Legacy systems were built to document what happened,” Fulmer explains. “Modern healthcare organizations need systems that can interpret risk, surface opportunities, and support proactive decision-making.”
How Does Technology Help Address Hospital Workforce Challenges?
Hospitals continue to face workforce shortages across CDI, coding, case management, and physician advisory roles.
“These are highly specialized roles that are difficult to recruit and retain,” says Fulmer.
Brundage Group uses technology to decrease administrative burden by automating routine processes, freeing clinical experts to focus on higher-value patient care decisions.
Technology cannot replace clinical expertise, but it can absorb routine work and allow experts to focus where human judgment is truly needed.
How Is AI Changing Healthcare Revenue Cycle Management?
According to Fulmer, healthcare is moving from reactive systems to predictive systems powered by AI, enabling earlier identification of denial risks and more proactive revenue management.
“We’re moving from systems that record what happened to systems that anticipate what’s about to happen,” he says. hospitals that embrace this approach will operate very differently in the next five years,” Fulmer predicts.
Why Is Human Expertise Still Essential in Healthcare Technology?
Despite advances in AI and automation, Fulmer emphasizes that technology alone cannot replace clinical judgment.
“A flag from an algorithm is only a hypothesis,” he says. “It still takes a physician to determine whether documentation accurately reflects the patient’s condition and the care delivered.”
That is why Brundage Group maintains a physician-led approach to revenue integrity and clinical documentation improvement.
“The technology accelerates the work,” Fulmer explains. “But the decisions that affect compliance, reimbursement, and patient care still require clinical expertise.”
Why Does Revenue Integrity Matter for Community Hospitals?
According to Fulmer, strong revenue cycle performance directly affects a hospital’s ability to serve its community.
“A hospital that captures the revenue it has earned is a hospital that can retain staff, sustain services, and continue caring for patients locally,” he says.
When hospitals maintain financial stability:
- Communities retain local access to care.
- Critical services remain available.
- Staffing stability improves.
- Patient outcomes improve.
- Long-term sustainability strengthens.
That’s the larger purpose behind every workflow, every algorithm, and every chart review,” Fulmer says. “Keeping community hospitals healthy so they can keep their communities healthy.
Ready to Strengthen Revenue Integrity?
It’s time for hospital leaders to evaluate their technology strategies, streamline operational gaps, and prioritize revenue integrity initiatives that directly impact their community’s well-being.
