“Tell us what you need.”
While these five words are often intended to sound collaborative, for many healthcare operators they feel like one more task added to an already overloaded to-do list. Clinicians and front-line workers are frequently recognized for being understaffed and overextended, but healthcare operators are another group whose burden is often overlooked.
The responsibility for managing access, staffing, patient experience, and financial performance — all at the same time — sits squarely with operators. After years of working on the front end for healthcare providers and more recently transitioning to the vendor side, I’ve seen firsthand the stress and frustration that arise when operators are asked to manage the very work they outsourced in the first place.
Beyond Analytics: How Sellers Dorsey is Hard-Coding Value into Medicaid Policy [Video]
How to turn analytics into actual policy outcomes.
The bottom line is this: when revenue cycle partners wait to be asked, or rely on “tell us what you need” as a default, they miss critical opportunities to deliver meaningful performance, support their client organizations, and ultimately serve patients better. In today’s healthcare environment, partnership requires anticipation, not reaction.
Too little too late
Much like emergency situations that don’t fall neatly into weekday business hours, healthcare operators are often confronted with issues that leave little room for reactive support. By the time a problem surfaces, patients and performance have already been impacted. In these moments, time is critical, and success depends on having an all-hands-on-deck approach in place from the start, not after the damage is done.
Yet across many of the hospitals and health systems I’ve worked with, particularly within billing and revenue cycle functions, outsourced support too often shows up as a vendor, not a true partner. Operators rarely have the bandwidth to articulate future needs in real time, especially in the middle of a disruption. What they need instead is an extension of their team: a partner that can anticipate challenges, identify pain points, and help troubleshoot operational details before they become larger issues. When partners wait to be asked, they lose the opportunity to relieve pressure, protect performance, and create real value.
The New Blueprint: How Clever Care Health Plan is Scaling Its Member Experience [Video]
MedCity News was at the Vive conference and spoke with executives who shared their insights for the healthcare industry.
Vendor vs. partner: The difference matters
The clearest way to distinguish a vendor from a true partner is simple: vendors respond, partners anticipate. If you’re constantly having to “babysit” your vendor or explain what you need after an issue arises, you don’t have a partner, you have a transaction.
It’s not enough for an outsource provider to show up with a list of KPIs they can help you achieve. True partners understand the business itself. They can articulate operational priorities, financial pressures, and organizational realities as fluently as the operators they support. In some cases, partners even anticipate issues before they occur.
Here is what this looks like in practice, particularly within revenue cycle operations and financial sustainability:
- Identify patterns that drive performance. A true partner can look at aging AR, denial trends or call center metrics to say, “Hey, if this trend continues, here’s what you’re going to feel operationally in 30-60 days.”
- Translate data into operational reality. Rather than stopping at, “Denials are up 4% this quarter,” a partner bridges the gap between data and experience: “This will likely show up as longer patient calls, higher staff burnout, and delayed cash unless we adjust now.”
- Represent the organization. One of the clearest indicators of true partnership is when patients can’t tell whether they’re speaking with an outsourced team member or someone internal. Strong partners understand the communities they serve, recognize the differences between rural, academic, and multi-site systems, and consider how every operational change will be felt by patients.
- Communicate proactively. True partners speak up not only when something is wrong, but when things are working. Shorter call times, clearer front-end data and smoother registration experiences are all worth celebrating. In complex healthcare environments, no news is not good news — silence creates anxiety, while insight builds confidence.
Raising the bar across the organization
Peter Drucker coined the phrase “culture eats strategy for breakfast.” It’s a reminder that even the strongest operational plans stall without the right partnership model to support them. When an outsourcing relationship feels more like a cog in the wheel than a catalyst for growth, it’s a sign that something needs to change.
True partners bring proactivity, empathy, action, and consistency to the table. They don’t stop at outlining next week’s plan, but rather they help shape a roadmap for the next 10 to 12 months. In complex healthcare environments, silence and reactivity allow organizations to form their own narratives, often with unintended consequences. Engaging the right partner early creates clarity, alignment, and momentum. Ultimately, this sets both the organization and its patients up for long-term success.
Picture: phototechno, Getty Images
Brianne Morrill is Director of Client Strategy and Implementation at Revenue Enterprises, where she serves on the executive team and partners with healthcare organizations to strengthen patient access and revenue cycle performance. With more than a decade of experience spanning front-line operations to multi-clinic leadership, she brings an operator’s perspective to client strategy. A connector by nature, Morrill focuses on building trusted partnerships, guiding organizations through onboarding and optimization, and bringing clarity to complex work. She is passionate about aligning people and processes to support both patient financial advocacy and long-term organizational sustainability. Morrill resides in Lewisville, Texas.
This post appears through the MedCity Influencers program. Anyone can publish their perspective on business and innovation in healthcare on MedCity News through MedCity Influencers. Click here to find out how.