Revenue Cycle Tech That Pays for Itself: Building the ROI Case for Automation
In today’s economic climate, hospital finance and revenue cycle leaders are facing mounting pressure to do more with less – fewer FTEs, tighter margins, and increasingly complex payer requirements. But while many teams are focused on cutting costs, some savvy revenue cycle executives are shifting the conversation to strategically appropriating funds to automating revenue cycle workflows with technology that quickly pays for itself.
That shift begins with one of the most critical metrics in healthcare finance: cost-to-collect.
Why Cost-to-Collect Is the New North Star
For many hospitals, cost-to-collect remains stubbornly high. Administrative bloat, fragmented tech stacks, and manual workflows — especially around fax, phone, and document handling — drain resources and delay reimbursements.
Leaders increasingly view automation not as a luxury, but a strategic necessity to:
- Decrease manual labor in prior authorization, financial clearance, and documentation workflows
- Reduce delays tied to paper-based processes
- Improve the speed, accuracy, and auditability of supporting documentation for claims
Yet even when automation seems like the clear answer, the challenge is justifying the investment. How do you make the case for automation compared to other needs?
Building the Business Case: Showcasing Hard Dollar ROI
Investments in revenue cycle technology must stand up to scrutiny — especially in nonprofit or value-based care environments where capital is scarce.
The most effective ROI cases:
- Tie automation directly to reductions in cost-to-collect
- Quantify FTE savings or redeployment
- Show impact on key KPIs like days in A/R, denial rates, or first-pass resolution
VHC Health saw incredible improvements as they implemented the TraceⓇ Platform. At the beginning of the implementation, they started with 220 ambulatory providers and over 2.5 million faxes coming into the hospital every year. With staff manually indexing, that time built up. However, since implementation, they’ve seen the following results:
- Reducing a 10-15 minute process to 3 minutes or less per document
- Tossing out their 29-page tip sheet
- 90% automated processes for OR scheduling
By making documentation easier, the time savings, accuracy, and visibility tied into the workflows result in tangible time savings.
Automating the “Last Mile” of the Revenue Cycle
Much of the revenue cycle still runs on outdated communication such as printed forms, emailed PDFs, phone calls, scans, and faxed documents that require manual indexing and uploading. This is where Vyne Medical shines.
Vyne MedicalⓇ Solutions helps revenue cycle teams:
- Capture and link documentation (e.g., voice calls, faxes, images) directly to the patient record within the Trace Platform.
- Automatically classify and index documents using AI-powered solutions like HealthyData to ingest and route data to the EMR accurately while keeping humans in the loop.
- Improve payer communication and support denials management with solutions like Trace’s Voice Recording solutions and PixCert, an image and screen capture tool.
The right technology reduces cost-to-collect while building a foundation for sustainable growth.
At Moffitt Cancer Center, for example, the financial clearance unit used Vyne’s Trace platform to streamline documentation around prior authorizations. They were able to reduce denied revenue from 16% to 5% over four years, thanks to better documentation and more efficient workflows.
Start with a Workflow Assessment
Not sure where to start your automation journey? Vyne Medical offers a workflow assessment to help health systems:
- Identify high-friction processes that increase cost-to-collect
- Pinpoint what can be automated (and what shouldn’t be)
- Estimate ROI* based on current workflows and staffing
It’s not about “rip and replace.” It’s about targeted automation that delivers measurable value quickly. Find a need to automate now, and expand over time.
Ready to Find the Value Hiding in Your Workflows?
Your team doesn’t need more technology. It needs the right technology, aligned to your KPIs, integrated with your systems, and justified by a clear business case.
Explore how a workflow assessment can help lower your cost-to-collect while improving operational resilience.
*Estimated ROI tool is for exploratory purposes only and is an analysis designed for estimating hypothetical results based on variable data provided by the user and is in no way a guarantee of actual results.