I Forecast the Future of Revenue Cycle Management From a Travel Company. Here's Why That Makes Me Better At It.
I spend my days now helping people travel more, travel better, and spend less. Not a hospital in sight. And yet I write a weekly briefing on the future of healthcare revenue cycle management that CFOs, RCM vendor CEOs, and private equity operators actually read.
People find that strange. I find it inevitable. Because the reason I can see where the revenue cycle is headed has almost nothing to do with being in healthcare, and almost everything to do with no longer being buried alive in it.
This is a piece about that. About why the best vantage point on an industry is often a step outside of it, why the way we work is quietly stealing strategic thinking from the people we most need to do it, and how revenue cycle leadership has to change before 2030 arrives and answers the question for us.
Key takeaways:
Revenue cycle strategy is fundamentally about consumer behavior, data, and trust, which is why a marketing background can prepare you for it better than a purely operational one.
Most RCM leaders can't see what's coming because they have no time to think. The industry confuses being busy with being strategic.
Operational minutiae masquerades as strategy because it's urgent and visible. The actual strategic work is invisible and never urgent until it's too late.
The fix is structural: protect thinking time like infrastructure, separate the operator from the strategist, and build leaders fluent in finance, technology, and human behavior.
How does someone at a travel company end up forecasting the future of healthcare revenue cycle management?
Because revenue cycle strategy isn't really about healthcare. It's about consumer behavior, data, and trust, and I spent the first thirteen years of my career learning those three things long before I ever touched a claim.
That first career was digital and event marketing and analytics, for brands you'd know: American Honda, Betty Crocker, TempurPedic, TIAA, the Dallas Morning News. My entire job was to figure out what a human being actually wants, then use their own data to earn their attention long enough to launch a product or move a number. Consumers were never accounts to me. They were people with choices, and respecting that was the whole job.
Then I crossed into the RCM vendor side and spent thirteen more years there, building products designed to close the trust gap between patients, providers, and payers while using automation to give staff their time back and protect a hospital's A/R. Now I work in travel. So I've watched consumer behavior from three very different rooms, and the patterns rhyme more than anyone in any single room realizes.
That double vision is the engine behind everything I write.
What did a marketing career teach you that revenue cycle leaders often miss?
The single most important thing: the patient is a consumer with choices, and you earn money by earning trust and NOT by chasing a balance.
In marketing, that idea is so basic it's oxygen. You don't get to treat a person like a line item, because if you do, they leave, and your livelihood depends on them not leaving. You obsess over their experience because their loyalty is the entire business model.
Healthcare's reflex runs the other way. The industry was built to look at a patient and see a balance — an account to be worked, an insurance company to be billed, a statement to be mailed, a collection to be made. I'm not saying that out of contempt. I loved the people I worked with on the provider and vendor side, and they cared about patients more than the public currently sharpening pitchforks would ever believe. But the structure trained them to optimize the transaction, while my first career had trained me to optimize the relationship.
That gap matters more every single year. Retail and big tech are entering healthcare. Patients now use AI to research their own care before they ever call you. Price transparency rules keep tightening. Every one of those forces rewards organizations that treat patients like consumers and punishes the ones that treat them like balances. The marketing brain saw this coming a decade out, because it's the only lens we were ever allowed to use.
Why can you see where RCM is heading when leaders inside it can't?
Because I'm not working twelve-hour days anymore, buried in back-to-back meetings, with no white space on the calendar to actually think. Distance is the prerequisite for pattern recognition.
I've described it as the difference between being in a storm and watching it on radar. Inside a bad storm, you can't see the shape of it. It's wind and dark and the sound of something on the roof, and you holding onto whatever's solid until it passes. The shape only exists on the radar, where somebody calm and dry, two states away, can trace exactly where it's headed.
For years I was in the storm. Soaked, bracing a door, surviving the next Tuesday. You do not forecast the future from there. You forecast it from the radar, and the only reason I'm on your radar now is that I climbed out of the daily grind that kept my eyes on the floor instead of the horizon.
Calling me an "oracle" is generous. The honest version is simpler: I'm not smarter than the leaders still inside it. I just have time to look around.
How does the healthcare industry fail its own leaders?
It fails them by drowning them in operational minutiae that feels strategic but isn't, leaving almost no capacity for the thinking that actually protects the organization.
Here's the trap, and it's a structural one, not a personal one. The minutiae masquerades as strategy because it is urgent and visible. The denial batch, the staffing fire, the payer escalation, the thirty-first meeting of the week — all of it screams for attention, all of it feels important, and clearing it feels like progress. Meanwhile the genuinely strategic work, the kind that requires you to zoom out and see the storm on the radar, is invisible and never urgent. Right up until the moment it is catastrophic.
So leaders manage by committee, at the speed of Outlook calendar Tetris. They mistake a full calendar for a productive one. They react brilliantly to the present and miss the future entirely, not because they lack the talent to see it, but because the system has confiscated the one thing seeing it requires: unstructured time to think.
We have built an entire profession that rewards busy-ness and starves reflection, then we act surprised when our most capable people can't tell us what's coming. That's not a leadership failure. That's a design failure.
Isn't being deep in the operational details what makes a leader effective?
Operational fluency matters, but it has a ceiling. Past a certain point, more detail doesn't make you a sharper strategist. It makes you a more informed firefighter.
This is the objection I hear most, and I take it seriously, because there's truth in it. You cannot lead a revenue cycle you don't understand. Detail is the price of credibility, and a leader who's never worked a denial or read a remittance will get both disrespected and steamrolled.
But there's a difference between knowing the work and being consumed by it. The best leaders know enough to ask the right question, then guard the altitude they need to actually see the answer. Detail is an input to strategy. It is not strategy. When the details fill 100 percent of your week, you haven't become more strategic. You've become a very expensive, very well-informed responder to things that already happened.
How should revenue cycle leadership change by 2030?
We have to treat strategic thinking time as infrastructure, redesign leadership roles around foresight rather than throughput, and build cross-functional leaders fluent in finance, technology, and human behavior.
I touched on the workforce shift in the RCM 2030 Workforce Modernization Guide. Here's where I want to push it further than the book did, specifically for leadership:
Treat thinking time like a line item, not a luxury. White space on a leader's calendar is not idleness. It is where strategy is manufactured. If you would never run your A/R without a target, stop running your leaders without protected, defended, non-negotiable time to think. Measure it like you measure days in A/R.
Separate the operator from the strategist. You cannot run the day-to-day at full capacity and watch the horizon at full capacity. Those are two jobs. The organizations that win will build structures where someone owns the operational floor so the leader can own the future… instead of asking one exhausted person to do both badly.
Redefine the role itself. The next generation of RCM leaders won't be budget-approvers. They'll be capability-builders, shaping budgets around the skills their teams need next. They'll carry fluency in cybersecurity, interoperability, and change psychology with the same ease their predecessors reserved for payer contracts. Some of them will earn a title that doesn't widely exist yet — call it Chief Revenue Experience Officer — because the work is no longer just collecting money. It's owning the entire financial relationship with a human being.
Hire and promote for capability, not credentials. A job title tells you what someone used to do, not what they can do next. Look for the skill clusters that carry forward through any system change: curiosity, adaptability, empathy, and fluency with both data and regulation. The coder who questions a strange AI output protects more revenue than the one who processes flawlessly but never challenges the logic.
Stop hiring only from inside healthcare. This is the one the industry resists hardest, and it's the one I'd argue for most. Healthcare over-indexes on healthcare-only résumés, then wonders why everyone sees the same blind spots at the same time. The marketing brain, the consumer-analytics brain, the operations brain from a different industry — those are not liabilities to be trained out. They are exactly the outside vantage points that let a team see the storm before it makes landfall. My whole value to this field is that I didn't start in it.
I'm a revenue cycle leader and I'm buried. What can I actually do right now?
Reclaim altitude in small, defensible increments. You don't need a sabbatical. You need to win back a few hours and a different field of view.
A few moves that don't require permission from anyone but yourself:
Block and ruthlessly defend two hours a week of no-meeting thinking time. Treat it like a payer meeting you cannot move.
Audit your standing meetings. For each one, ask: is this strategy, or is it theater? Kill or delegate one this month.
Run every recurring commitment through a single filter: is this urgent, or is it important? The urgent will always shout louder. Protect the important anyway.
Read one thing a week from outside healthcare. Retail, consumer tech, marketing, banking. Cross-pollination is where pattern recognition is born.
Build the "someone else owns the day-to-day" plan now, even if you can't staff it yet. Knowing what you'd hand off is the first step to handing it off.
Why does this matter for hospitals and patients, not just for leaders?
Because leaders with no time to think make reactive decisions, and in an environment moving this fast, reactive decisions cost margin, trust, and ultimately patient care.
Federal policy is shifting at the speed of light. The technology is moving faster than that. And healthcare, with all my love, still moves at roughly the speed of smell: six to twelve months just to make a strategic technology decision, then another year or two to implement it. Run that math against a 2030 that is now three years away. Three years sounds like room. In revenue cycle time, it is barely one decision-and-implementation cycle. We are nearly out of runway to start.
A leader who can think is the difference between a hospital that anticipates that and one that gets flattened by it. This was never really about calendars. It's about whether the people steering our health systems have the altitude to steer at all.
I didn't write RCM 2030 or the workbooks that go with it to be proven right. I wrote them for the leaders still inside the storm: the CFO, the revenue cycle director, the vendor CEO, the PE operator staring at a portfolio company's A/R and wondering how fast all of this actually moves. The people I used to both work with and fight for.
I can play radar for this industry for one reason only: I climbed out far enough to see the shape of it. If your organization needs help turning all of this from a storm you're surviving into a plan you're running, that's the work I do now. You can work with me here, and you can read where the revenue cycle is headed every week in RCM 2030 Weekly.
The future is already on the radar. The only question is whether you've given yourself the altitude to read it..
