We are always striving to improve in the healthcare world. How can we give better care to our patients? What can be done to reduce workflow burdens on our staff? Is there any technology or application that could improve how this is done? Are there populations that are being underserved in care? It is through this constant push to be better that we are able to make people healthier and happier. We have come a long way in our strides, but there is still work to be done. So in that vein, we reached out to our beautiful Healthcare IT Today Community to ask — what back office needs are being well addressed by IT and what areas still haven’t really been touched by technology? The following are their answers.
John Squeo, Senior Vice President at CitiusTech
Technology has made meaningful strides in financial close automation, payroll processing, benefits administration, knowledge management and training, and procurement workflows, which comprise mature, well-understood problem spaces with measurable ROI. Revenue cycle management has seen significant tech investment and continues to advance rapidly with AI-assisted coding, AI-enriched prior authorization, and denial and appeals management.
However, operational decision support, the layer between dashboards and frontline action, remains disproportionately under-clubbed, leaving leaders wanting more actionable insights and automated next actions. Orchestrated workforce experiences and internal service delivery in healthcare still lag far behind other industries, with fragmented tools creating friction and cognitive burden for clinicians navigating administrative tasks and managing information that is not collated or curated to their immediate needs.
Perhaps most critically, strategic cost accounting and true service-line profitability analysis remain surprisingly manual in most health systems, representing one of the most significant untapped opportunities for transformative technology investment.
Ram Mohan Natarajan, Global Head of Business Transformation at Sagility
Technology has made tremendous progress in automating repetitive, transactional work. Functions such as payroll administration, accounts payable, benefits management, procurement processing, scheduling, and many routine claims activities have become highly efficient through digitization and automation.
Where healthcare still faces significant opportunity is in managing complexity. Many operational processes involve unstructured information, multiple handoffs, policy interpretation, clinical context, provider-specific rules, regulatory requirements, and exception management. These areas remain highly dependent on manual effort, institutional knowledge, and fragmented workflows.
The next frontier is operational orchestration powered by AI. Rather than automating individual tasks, organizations are looking to connect data, intelligence, workflows, and expertise across the enterprise. Intelligent platforms can continuously analyze operational signals, identify emerging issues, recommend interventions, and coordinate actions across departments.
While technology can automate much of the work, healthcare will continue to require expert human judgment. The organizations that succeed will be those that effectively blend AI-driven intelligence with human expertise to deliver better outcomes, lower costs, and improved member and provider experiences.
Michael Meucci, President and CEO at Arcadia
Healthcare has made meaningful progress in modernizing foundational operational infrastructure, particularly around data aggregation, reporting, and enterprise visibility. These investments have improved organizations’ ability to monitor performance, identify inefficiencies, and support more informed operational decision-making.
Where the industry still struggles is workflow orchestration across highly fragmented systems and stakeholders. Many administrative processes remain manual, reactive, and disconnected from the clinical side of the organization.
As organizations begin introducing agentic AI capabilities into healthcare operations, solving those orchestration challenges becomes even more critical. AI systems are only as effective as the underlying data infrastructure, interoperability, and workflow connectivity supporting them.
The next phase of innovation will depend less on adding standalone technologies and more on creating coordinated operational and clinical ecosystems that allow intelligent automation to function reliably at scale.
Monte Sandler, Chief Operating Officer at WebPT
Healthcare has made significant progress in areas like claims submission, eligibility verification, reporting, and workflow automation. But many organizations still rely heavily on manual follow-up, resolving exceptions, and navigating changing payer requirements. AI is starting to unlock the complexity of these healthcare transactions, which will lead to pattern recognition and automation of repetitive tasks.
David Schummers, Vice President at Apella
The back-office wins of the last decade have been in finance and HR systems, where automation and reporting are now table stakes. The blind spot is the operational core of the hospital itself. The OR drives the majority of revenue and resource consumption, yet it’s still largely run on manual documentation, whiteboards, and tribal knowledge. Until that gap closes, downstream back-office systems will keep working with incomplete and delayed data.
Dr. Scott Schell, Chief Medical Officer at Cognizant
Healthcare has modernized ERP, workforce management, procurement, and revenue cycle operations. The greater challenge now is enterprise coordination. Organizations still struggle with fragmented workflows, disconnected operational visibility, workforce resilience, and institutional knowledge management. Those areas remain far less technologically mature than most people assume.
Blake Sollenberger, Strategic Services Managing Director – Revenue Cycle at Evergreen Healthcare Partners
Denial and A/R management is well addressed by IT, both automating many aspects of the custodial aspects of A/R resolution and quantifying or prioritizing the next best denials or underpayments to work, but denial prevention and revenue maximization in upstream clinical systems often require a confluence of coding and compliance guidelines, clinical term and financial term mapping content, and payer contract requirements at the point-of-care which involves multiple systems, stakeholders, and priorities that can often impede achieving the upper bound of payer reimbursement that’s attainable.
Such great answers! Huge thank you to everyone who took the time out of their day to submit a quote to us! And thank you to all of you for taking the time out of your day to read this article! We could not do this without all of your support.
What back office needs do you think are being well addressed by IT, and what areas still haven’t really been touched by technology? Let us know over on social media, we’d love to hear from all of you!
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