72 health IT & revenue cycle up-and-comers | 2026

Across hospitals, health systems and healthcare companies, a new generation of executives is stepping into key roles and making their mark. 

These rising leaders bring fresh thinking to complex challenges by reimagining organizational strategy, sharpening financial performance, and driving operational and technological innovation. Bold, sharp and deeply invested in the work, they are the driving force behind their organizations’ next chapter of growth.

Note: Becker’s Healthcare developed this list based on nominations and editorial research. This list is not exhaustive, nor is it an endorsement of included leaders, organizations or associated healthcare providers. Leaders cannot pay for inclusion on this list. Leaders are presented in alphabetical order. We extend a special thanks to Rhoda Weiss for her contributions to this list.

Contact Anna Falvey at afalvey@beckershealthcare.com with questions or comments.

Hospital and Health System Leaders

Kate Bakich. Deputy CIO for Health IT and Interim Chief Applications Officer at UVA Health (Charlottesville, Va.). As deputy CIO, Ms. Bakich partners with UVA Health’s CIO to lead a health IT division of about 600 professionals and guide financial strategy for a $220 million technology portfolio. She is also serving as interim chief applications officer, leading the health system’s enterprise applications during a national executive search. Ms. Bakich is leading a five-pillar transformation of health IT that embeds IT support within clinical and operational teams, expands research IT capabilities, strengthens cybersecurity, modernizes the EHR, builds a unified data and AI platform and introduces Agile delivery practices. She led the deployment of Microsoft DAX Copilot to more than 900 ambulatory providers, resulting in a 47% improvement in physician satisfaction with documentation and a 16% reduction in reported burnout. She has also reduced Epic upgrade downtime by 81% and maintained team engagement in the 91st percentile during significant organizational change. Her leadership has earned multiple KLAS “EMR Experience Breakthrough Awards,” and Ms. Bakich received UVA’s “Building Bridges Award” for advancing collaboration across the organization. She has 28 years of experience in healthcare and higher education technology, and previously served as administrator of IT service delivery, education and support at UVA Health from 2019 to 2026.

Robert Boos. Senior Vice President of Revenue Cycle at Covenant Health (Knoxville, Tenn.). Mr. Boos joined Covenant Health in March 2026 and leads systemwide revenue cycle operations, including patient access, health information management, coding, clinical documentation improvement, revenue integrity, patient accounting, financial analytics and revenue cycle optimization. Since his arrival, he has centralized professional coding under the revenue cycle function, and has established a joint revenue cycle and compliance structure to identify and mitigate revenue integrity and regulatory risks. He has also expanded patient financial experience initiatives through technology partnerships, including with Cedar, using AI-enabled tools to increase affordability options and streamline patient engagement, and he redesigned the revenue cycle leadership structure and operating model. Mr. Boos previously served as chief revenue officer and vice president of revenue cycle at Lynchburg, Va.-based Centra Health, where he led enterprisewide revenue cycle strategy across hospitals and an employed physician network. Before that, he spent more than a decade at Franklin, Tenn.-based Community Health Systems, where he drove revenue cycle standardization across multiple states and helped establish shared services operations for hospital and physician revenue cycle functions. Mr. Boos has more than 30 years of revenue cycle leadership experience. In 2026, he presented at the Georgia Healthcare Financial Management Association’s state conference and was selected to speak at the Tennessee Healthcare Financial Management Association’s annual conference.

Jess Boyle. Senior Director of Digital Care Transformation at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. Mr. Boyle directs Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia’s digital health program and provides strategic leadership across health informatics, overseeing enterprise initiatives in telehealth, virtual care, remote patient management, care model innovation, and clinical and patient-facing AI. He leads the strategy and execution of the hospital’s digital care-at-home portfolio, which includes 18 remote patient management programs supporting about 40,000 eligible patients, one of the nation’s highest-volume pediatric eConsult programs and enterprise video visits supporting tens of thousands of pediatric encounters annually across primary, specialty, urgent and follow-up care. Mr. Boyle also oversees the development of virtual inpatient care across clinical disciplines, along with virtual urgent and sick care, eVisits, telediagnostics and affiliate digital services. He serves as the hospital’s institutional co-lead for the KidsX Pediatric Digital Health Accelerator. Mr. Boyle has provided legislative testimony and policy leadership on telehealth coverage and payment parity, responsible regulation of healthcare AI, interstate licensure and sustainable cross-state virtual care. He also worked with the Children’s Hospital Association and other children’s hospitals to establish a federal pediatric digital care advocacy group focused on hospital-at-home policy and pediatric inclusion in CMS-aligned innovation efforts. Mr. Boyle speaks frequently at national forums, including those of the American Medical Informatics Association, the American Telemedicine Association and the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society.

Kim Bussie. Assistant Vice President of Revenue Integrity and Health Information Management at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. Ms. Bussie oversees health information management, coding, clinical documentation integrity and revenue integrity at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. Her responsibilities include coding quality and productivity, charge capture, clinical documentation standards, regulatory compliance and data governance. She developed an integrated middle revenue cycle governance model that aligns patient access, financial clearance, utilization management, coding, documentation, revenue integrity, patient financial services and information services teams to prevent revenue leakage. Ms. Bussie chairs the middle revenue cycle governance committee and the health information exchange oversight committee. She has also led development of executive-level governance structures, dashboards and frameworks that track revenue cycle performance. Her work targets documentation quality, coding accuracy, clean claim rates, denial prevention and reductions in discharged-not-final-billed and accounts receivable days. Ms. Bussie previously served as senior director of health information management.

Vianny Castillo. Director of Management Support and the Central Business Office at BayCare Health System (Clearwater, Fla.). Ms. Castillo leads revenue cycle operations supporting physician and ambulatory services at BayCare Health System, which has nearly 34,000 team members and 16 hospitals. She led central business office teams through a major acquisition, integrating the new operations into BayCare’s systems and processes. Ms. Castillo participated in the design, build, testing and implementation of BayCare Medical Group’s formation, as well as BayCare’s registration and scheduling conversions. She has spearheaded automation initiatives to streamline business processes and improve accuracy, and led efforts to reduce turnaround times and clear backlogs in critical work queues. Ms. Castillo also supports physician practice growth through acquisitions, new locations and workflow enhancements, working across teams to integrate new practices. She has held several roles at BayCare, including systems analyst, IT coordinator lead, manager of patient accounts and manager of physician operations for the central business office.

Jason Christensen. Vice President of Corporate Revenue Cycle at St. Luke’s University Health Network (Bethlehem, Pa.). Mr. Christensen leads revenue cycle operations for St. Luke’s University Health Network, including patient registration, insurance verification, coding support, billing, claims management, reimbursement, denial prevention and management, patient financial services and collections. He develops strategies to improve operational efficiency, maximize appropriate reimbursement and enhance the patient financial experience, and he aligns revenue cycle operations across the network’s hospitals, physician practices and outpatient facilities. Mr. Christensen joined St. Luke’s as assistant vice president of revenue cycle in December 2020 and was promoted to his current role in January 2022. He has more than 30 years of healthcare revenue cycle experience and has led the adoption of technologies including AI to improve revenue cycle efficiency. Before St. Luke’s, Mr. Christensen spent a decade at Franklin, Tenn.-based Community Health Systems, where he served as COO and later vice president of its shared services center. He previously served as director of patient financial services at Health Management Associates from 1999 to 2010. 

Craig Connors. Vice President of Revenue Cycle and Payer Relations at Valley Health (Winchester, Va.). Mr. Connors serves as vice president of revenue cycle and payer relations at Valley Health, where he reports to the CFO and is responsible for strengthening revenue cycle operations and payer relations. He previously served as vice president of payer relations and strategy at the Virginia Hospital & Healthcare Association, where he worked with hospitals and health systems on payer issues, regulatory matters, collaboration and strategy. In that role, Mr. Connors was the association’s primary health insurance expert and worked on advocacy and health insurance reform. He serves as facilitator of the association’s payer advisory committee, which includes all Virginia hospitals. Mr. Connors’ expertise includes Medicaid and Medicare operations management and payer relations. 

Tiffany Cross. Senior Vice President and CIO at Covenant Health (Knoxville, Tenn.). Ms. Cross leads Covenant Health’s enterprise technology strategy, cybersecurity program, clinical informatics, data and analytics strategy and information systems operations. She was named to the role in 2026 after serving as vice president of clinical informatics from 2022 to 2026, and she has held IT and informatics leadership positions at Covenant since 2010. Ms. Cross began her career as a medical laboratory professional, serving as chief medical technologist at Fort Sanders Regional Medical Center in Knoxville, Tenn. She has led the deployment of ambient listening technology and the expansion of AI-enabled clinical documentation across primary care, oncology, cardiology, hospital medicine and emergency medicine. Ms. Cross has also led the expansion of virtual care and digital health services, as well as enterprise modernization initiatives including a Microsoft 365 implementation, cybersecurity enhancements and infrastructure upgrades. She is an adjunct faculty member in the University of Tennessee’s health informatics graduate certificate program. From 2007 to 2010, she served as education chair for a national EHR vendor organization.

Anthony Cunningham. Chief Revenue Officer at LCMC Health (New Orleans). Mr. Cunningham leads revenue cycle operations as chief revenue officer of LCMC Health, a nonprofit health system in the Gulf South. He brings more than two decades of revenue cycle leadership experience, including overseeing more than $7 billion in net patient service revenue and teams of more than 1,400 employees. Before joining LCMC Health, he held senior leadership roles with Charlotte, N.C.-based Atrium Health/Advocate Health, Northeast Georgia Health System in Gainesville, Boston-based Mass General Brigham and Deloitte Consulting, where he specialized in revenue cycle redesign, shared services development, technology implementation and financial performance improvement. Under Mr. Cunningham’s leadership, LCMC Health has worked to modernize revenue cycle operations, focusing on front-end financial processes, reimbursement performance, payer relationships and data-driven insights. In 2025, LCMC Health increased revenue from $3.48 billion to $3.9 billion, an increase of approximately $424 million. The system attributed the growth to expansion across the Greater New Orleans region and strong performance in high-acuity service lines, including neuroscience, heart and vascular care, and cancer services.

Julie Demaree. Chief Technology and Digital Innovation Officer at St. Mary’s Healthcare (Amsterdam, N.Y.). Ms. Demaree joined St. Mary’s Healthcare in 2023 as executive director of clinical innovation and transformation, and was later promoted to chief technology and digital innovation officer, a role in which she drives the organization’s digital strategy. A physician assistant with more than 25 years of clinical and operational experience, she oversees digital initiatives including telehealth services, electronic self-registration, centralized patient navigation and ambient AI documentation. Under her leadership, the rural health system implemented ambient AI documentation tools that eliminated hundreds of overdue clinical notes, supporting faster billing and referrals. Ms. Demaree also leads enterprisewide EHR optimization and established a multidisciplinary IT governance committee that meets weekly to evaluate optimization opportunities. She led operational and cultural changes as St. Mary’s improved its Leapfrog hospital safety grade from a “D” to an “A” in spring 2026. Ms. Demaree is a certified professional in healthcare information and management systems and a fellow of the American Academy of Physician Associates and the American College of Health Data Management. She previously held clinical informatics leadership roles at Saratoga (N.Y.) Hospital.

Keisha Downes. Vice President of Mid-Revenue Cycle at Beth Israel Lahey Health (Cambridge, Mass.). Ms. Downes leads clinical documentation improvement, health information management operations, and hospital and professional coding across 14 academic and community facilities at Beth Israel Lahey Health. She oversees more than 500 full-time equivalent employees and a $62 million budget. Through clinical documentation improvement program development and the implementation of AI-powered documentation technology, Ms. Downes has driven $41.3 million in annual revenue impact, including improvements in case mix index and revenue capture. That impact supported the approval of 10 additional full-time positions. Ms. Downes serves on Beth Israel Lahey Health’s committee on responsible AI use and led the system’s evaluation of autonomous coding vendors. She also serves on the Association of Clinical Documentation Integrity Specialists advisory board and is a member of the HealthLeaders Revenue Cycle Mastermind. Ms. Downes previously served as senior director of mid-revenue cycle at Burlington, Mass.-based Tufts Medicine and teaches health information management as an adjunct professor at Purdue Global University.

Nicole L. Fountain. Vice President of Revenue Cycle at UChicago Medicine. Ms. Fountain leads end-to-end revenue cycle functions for UChicago Medicine, managing a team of 450 people across emergency department and inpatient registration, insurance verification, financial clearance, financial counseling, patient financial services and revenue integrity. She builds systemwide shared services models supporting the health system’s academic medical center, community-based medical center, community physician groups, ambulatory surgery centers, home care, hospice and behavioral health teams while maintaining a cost to collect of less than 2%. Ms. Fountain helped stabilize cash positions six months after an Epic conversion, set a then-record cash collection year and reduced candidate-for-bill amounts. She led the revenue cycle implementation team for a new micro-hospital serving Northwest Indiana and managed the Epic integration at Ingalls Memorial Hospital in Harvey, Ill. Under her direction, the health system has adopted revenue cycle automation and AI tools, both internally built and through external vendor partnerships, along with Power BI dashboards to reduce denials and streamline accounts receivable management. She also established a revenue cycle training and certification program that enabled dozens of employees to pass advanced credentialing exams within months of its rollout. Ms. Fountain received the “Carl Satterfield President’s Award” from the National Association of Healthcare Access Management, where she serves as board secretary and treasurer.

Mandi Keeler Van Gessel. Director of Data and Analytics at Corewell Health (Grand Rapids, Mich.). Ms. Keeler Van Gessel leads Corewell Health’s corporate finance analytics team within the integrated data analytics organization, providing reporting, data insights and decision support for finance, supply chain, revenue cycle, managed care contracting, ambulatory operations and Epic Community Connect practices. Her team’s work supports leaders across Corewell Health and Priority Health. She led the integrated data analytics team’s work supporting Corewell Health’s “One Epic Ecosystem” initiative, which unified data from three organizations into a single Epic environment. Her team’s analytics, reporting and performance measurement supported Corewell Health Reed City (Mich.) Hospital in earning the Healthcare Financial Management Association’s 2026 “MAP Award for an Individual Hospital.” In 2023, Ms. Keeler Van Gessel established a weekly integrated data analytics manager sync, and in 2024 she launched its advisory council to strengthen communication and alignment across teams. She received a “Compliance Champion Award” for challenging third-party vendor data extract contracts and questioning the release of sensitive organizational data, which helped keep protected information within the organization. Over her 25-year career, Ms. Keeler Van Gessel has served as manager of integrated data analytics and manager of enterprise information management, among other roles.

Brian Holman. Vice President of Revenue Cycle Value Creation at Jefferson Health (Philadelphia). Mr. Holman currently serves as Jefferson Health’s vice president of revenue cycle value creation, a newly created role to which he was promoted. There, he leads enterprise revenue cycle value creation initiatives aimed at expanding margin, improving cash flow and reducing revenue leakage. He first joined Jefferson Health as senior director of revenue cycle management in 2024, days before the system completed its merger with Allentown, Pa.-based Lehigh Valley Health Network, and was asked to lead post-merger revenue cycle integration. In that role, Mr. Holman assessed two separate Epic environments, helped align revenue cycle policies and workflows, and executed an integration work plan that supported enterprise standardization. He also serves as the access and revenue cycle readiness executive for the Epic implementation at Einstein hospitals and physician practices. In 2026, Mr. Holman took on project management of the revenue cycle initiatives within “Project Path Forward,” an enterprisewide transformation effort Jefferson Health launched in 2025 across its health system, insurance plan and university. The revenue cycle workstream exceeded its fiscal year target of $100 million, and the value creation team is expected to deliver an additional $100 million in revenue improvement this fiscal year. Mr. Holman also contributes to Jefferson Health’s revenue cycle AI development workstream.

Howard Kung. Vice President of Mid-Revenue Cycle at Stanford Health Care (Palo Alto, Calif.). Mr. Kung provides strategic leadership for Stanford Health Care’s enterprisewide mid-revenue cycle operations, which encompassed $9.5 billion in net patient revenue in fiscal 2025. He holds operational accountability for health information management, hospital and professional coding services, revenue integrity and clinical documentation integrity teams, and serves as a key liaison with finance and administration, medical school leadership and clinical chairs. Mr. Kung led the integration of AI into Stanford Health Care’s mid-revenue cycle operations, implementing intelligent coding tools and predictive analytics to improve compliance, accuracy and billing timeliness. By involving clinical teams and frontline staff in system design, he improved charge capture and reduced documentation delays. Before joining Stanford Health Care, Mr. Kung served as senior director of revenue integrity at Rochester, Minn.-based Mayo Clinic, where he oversaw revenue integrity operations across multiple campuses and was an instructor of healthcare administration at the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine and Sciences; earlier, he was director of revenue capture at Los Angeles-based UCLA Health. He is a fellow of the Healthcare Financial Management Association and the American College of Healthcare Executives, and has served on the leadership council of the National Association for Healthcare Revenue Integrity.

Amy Levine. System Director of Patient Financial Experience at Hartford (Conn.) HealthCare. Ms. Levine oversees Hartford HealthCare’s patient financial experience, including patient customer service, financial assistance, patient estimates and balances after insurance. She recently led the transition to a new customer service vendor partnership that uses advanced technology to improve patient engagement and satisfaction. Ms. Levine has served in several enterprisewide interim leadership roles, including patient access, revenue cycle integration, and financial clearance and prior authorization. She co-developed an early-career revenue cycle development program to support employee engagement, retention and professional growth. Ms. Levine has held revenue cycle roles at Hartford HealthCare since 2012, previously serving as director of revenue cycle, customer service and self-pay, and before that was a practice manager at Midstate Medical Group from 2007 to 2012.

Samantha McQuage, MSN. Senior Applications Director at Baptist Health (Jacksonville, Fla.). Ms. McQuage leads a portfolio of clinical applications at Baptist Health supporting service lines including research, genomics and pharmacy. She oversees Epic and third-party clinical systems across the health system and leads multidisciplinary teams of analysts and managers. Ms. McQuage plays a central leadership role in the “Baptist Health Specialty Pharmacy Program,” an initiative involving multiple stakeholders that spans clinical workflows, regulatory compliance and system integration. She also co-owns the system’s superuser program, which supports enterprisewide training, adoption and change management. Ms. McQuage brings more than 20 years of experience as a labor and delivery nurse, and more than 15 years in Epic and informatics leadership. She previously served as director of clinical informatics at Richmond, Va.-based VCU Health. She has piloted an AI workflow solution at the health system and spoke at ViVE 2025 in Nashville, Tenn., about using AI simulation training to build nurses’ confidence and competence. Ms. McQuage is a member of iMethods women’s thought leadership group.

Vong Miphouvieng. Vice President of Health Information Management and Clinical Documentation Integrity at Texas Health Resources (Arlington). Mr. Miphouvieng leads health information management and clinical documentation integrity functions at Texas Health Resources, which serves more than 1.7 million patients annually through more than 420 access points, including 29 hospital locations. His areas include documentation and regulatory compliance, release of information, transcription, data integrity and electronic document management, as well as data quality and reporting. Mr. Miphouvieng implemented AI technology to index digitized documents and helped launch CareScan, a point-of-care scanning tool that lets staff scan multiple documents for multiple patients simultaneously. Under his leadership, Texas Health centralized release of information so requestors can obtain health records, billing records, radiology images and mammography records from one department regardless of where patients received care. He has also supported a new inpatient clinical coding apprenticeship program designed to upskill employees and expand the system’s pool of inpatient coders. Mr. Miphouvieng joined Texas Health in 2007 and has advanced through several leadership roles, including senior director of operations and regulatory compliance for health information management. He is a volunteer member of the American Health Information Management Association’s awards and recognition committee.

Jeff Mooneyham. Executive Director of IT at Decatur (Ala.) Morgan Hospital. Mr. Mooneyham was promoted to executive director of IT at Decatur Morgan Hospital in July 2025, one year after joining the organization as manager of technical services. He oversees the planning, implementation and maintenance of the hospital’s IT infrastructure, systems and applications. Mr. Mooneyham manages the IT budget, vendors, contracts and policies, and is responsible for ensuring compliance with security and data protection standards. He also leads the IT staff and provides them with training, guidance and support. Under his leadership, the IT department has implemented multiple technology enhancements, including product expansions within the hospital’s Meditech EHR designed to streamline workflows and improve operational efficiency. Mr. Mooneyham has more than 25 years of work experience. He previously served as director of IT for Lanier Ford Shaver & Payne and as an engineer tech for Intergraph.

Joseph Nedbal. Director of Customer Experience at Baylor Scott & White Health (Dallas). Mr. Nedbal leads the payment journey portfolio within Baylor Scott & White Health’s customer experience organization, owning its strategy, roadmap and day-to-day delivery. His work focuses on how patients understand their options, prepare for visits, make sense of the cost of care and pay, and he works with partners across digital health, revenue cycle operations, product design, analytics, IT and outside technology vendors. He has led the creation of patient-facing digital tools that help people understand what their care will cost before a visit, pay in ways that fit their lives and get help when they need it. Mr. Nedbal has more than 15 years of experience across Baylor Scott & White Health, Rochester, Minn.-based Mayo Clinic and Livonia, Mich.-based Trinity Health, including EHR projects that reached dozens of hospitals and hundreds of clinics. He previously served as senior director of revenue cycle strategy at Mayo Clinic and director of information systems applications at Trinity Health. Mr. Nedbal is also an adjunct professor at the University of Texas at Dallas, where he teaches health IT, health information systems, and billing and coding.

Christy Norton. Executive Director of Revenue Cycle at Decatur County Memorial Hospital (Greensburg, Ind.). Ms. Norton oversees prior authorization, patient registration, health information management, medical staff credentialing and privileging, and patient billing at Decatur County Memorial Hospital. She also oversees the hospital’s charity care program and serves as its risk manager, leading efforts to identify, assess and mitigate organizational risk and supporting staff risk education. Ms. Norton has more than 40 years of experience with Decatur County Memorial Hospital, where she previously served as director of health information management and director of quality, compliance and risk. She led the hospital through a multimonth implementation of Experian technologies, taking an active role in planning, education, process redesign and operational adoption. Ms. Norton pioneered the hospital’s denials prevention committee and chairs or participates in several committees, including the policy committee, the medical executive committee and the board of trustees’ compliance, risk management, and audit and finance committees. Outside the hospital, she is a board member of the Greensburg Community School District and a member of the Decatur County 4-H Council.

Tracy Porter. Chief Administrator of Revenue Cycle Operations and Optimization at UVA Health (Charlottesville, Va.). Ms. Porter leads enterprise revenue cycle operations at UVA Health, which spans 860 licensed beds, more than 2,800 providers, more than 3 million annual patient encounters, $12.2 billion in gross revenue and $3.2 billion in annual collections. Her oversight includes patient billing, accounts receivable and denial management, revenue integrity, financial counseling, financial assistance, payer enrollment, business analytics and vendor strategy. Under her leadership, hospital accounts receivable days decreased from 49.7 to 31.3, and professional billing accounts receivable days improved from 35.7 to 29.6. Hospital and professional cash collections both exceeded organizational goals, while insurance accounts receivable over 90 days ranked among the top 5% of Epic peer organizations nationally. Ms. Porter co-developed the health system’s three-year revenue cycle strategic plan and created an enterprise revenue cycle readiness framework for mergers and acquisitions. She also launched a leadership development program combining education, mentoring, job shadowing and leadership pathways that has been featured at Healthcare Financial Management Association conferences. Before joining UVA Health, Ms. Porter served as executive director of patient financial services at Baptist Health Care in Pensacola, Fla., from 2011 to 2024.

Kelsey Reed, DNP, MSN. Vice President, CNO and COO at Phoebe Sumter Medical Center (Americus, Ga.). Ms. Reed was promoted to vice president, CNO and COO of Phoebe Sumter Medical Center, a 76-bed community hospital in Albany, Ga.-based Phoebe Putney Health System, in March 2025 after serving as director of patient care for the health system. She oversees nursing operations, clinical care and patient safety, along with clinical support operations including imaging, laboratory, pharmacy and respiratory therapy. Ms. Reed guides the hospital’s strategic master plan, which includes expanding capacity to 99 beds, growing the maternal and robotics service lines and achieving level 3 trauma designation. She spearheaded the development and systemwide implementation of the health system’s virtual nursing program, which has grown to more than 30 virtual nurses and boosted sepsis screening bundle compliance by 20%. To address the local nursing shortage, Ms. Reed worked with senior leadership and a local technical college to launch the “Living and Learning Community,” a residential and learning facility, and quarterly nursing student enrollment increased from 20 to 120 students under her leadership. She also established the nurse simulation training and education program, a six-week simulation boot camp within the system’s yearlong nurse residency program, and led the implementation of Mako 4 SmartRobotics for total knee and hip replacements. The Georgia governor appointed Ms. Reed to the Senate Study Committee on Violence Against Health Care Workers.

Danielle Reese. Vice President of Patient Access and Pre-Services for Revenue Cycle at Hackensack Meridian Health (Edison, N.J.). Ms. Reese leads patient access functions for Hackensack Meridian Health’s revenue cycle, including scheduling, registration, insurance verification, financial clearance and pre-service collections. She leads front-end denial reduction initiatives aimed at maximizing cash collections, increasing automation and minimizing access-driven rework across the revenue cycle. Ms. Reese is harmonizing patient access operations across the network, centralizing functions including registration and overhauling financial clearance. As chair of the department’s access advisory governance committee, she brings together access leaders, physician champions and technical teams, including on Epic alignment, to standardize functions networkwide. She also co-chairs a MyChart adoption and usage project and is expanding automation as part of an Epic Refuel effort. Before joining Hackensack Meridian Health, Ms. Reese served as executive director of revenue cycle and physician network at Chapel Hill, N.C.-based UNC Health and held roles at Baltimore-based Johns Hopkins Health System, including system director of patient financial services. She has more than 20 years of experience.

David Singer. CIO at LCMC Health (New Orleans). Mr. Singer serves as CIO of LCMC Health, a role he returned to after serving as vice president and CIO of East Tennessee Children’s Hospital in Knoxville. He previously spent seven years at LCMC Health, where he implemented software applications across the system with a focus on safety, quality, service and revenue cycle performance. During that tenure, Mr. Singer also helped implement strategic information technology programs affecting patient access, employee engagement and talent management, along with other system upgrades. As CIO, he leads the implementation and consolidation of new technology systems, with a focus on Epic optimization, strategic growth and IT operational excellence. Mr. Singer works as a partner to the hospital leadership team on safety, quality, patient experience and financial performance.

Pooja P. Vyas, DO. System Vice President of Care Coordination Liaison and Physician Advisement at SSM Health (St. Louis). Dr. Vyas works with SSM Health’s revenue cycle leaders on clinical denials, documentation integrity, prior authorization workflows and diagnosis-related group accuracy. She launched a three-tier clinical denials operating rhythm made up of a governance committee, a workgroup and a weekly concurrent denials huddle, creating the system’s first systemwide structure for escalation and decision rights. Supported by weekly Power BI analytics and midmonth projections, the model contributed to declines in final denial adjustments and improved authorization denial performance, according to the nomination. Dr. Vyas led the alignment of clinical documentation integrity, coding and quality teams through shared 2026 operating plans and standardized performance measures, including diagnosis-related group downgrades, query turnaround time, audit pass rate and denial overturn rate. She also is developing Epic-based training to improve physician documentation of clinically relevant diagnoses. Dr. Vyas collaborates with physician informaticists, CMIOs and Epic-focused innovation teams on documentation workflow redesign and payer-related automation. She has published on payer policy, administrative burden and negotiation strategies.

Lauren Watts. Director of Revenue Cycle, Financial and Administrative Applications at BayCare Health System (Clearwater, Fla.). Ms. Watts leads the strategy, governance and performance of the enterprise technology platforms supporting BayCare’s nearly 34,000 team members and 16 hospitals across West Central Florida. She oversees teams responsible for more than 100 integrated applications spanning financial operations, workforce management, revenue cycle, registration, scheduling and administrative functions, and manages a $31.5 million IT portfolio. Ms. Watts established BayCare’s first in-house automation development team, which builds solutions to reduce administrative burden on caregivers and team members. She has negotiated more than $10 million in vendor contracts and led large-scale modernization efforts, including BayCare’s workforce management transformation and enterprise cloud migration. Ms. Watts has also championed the adoption of AI and emerging technologies, including the implementation of Oracle Health’s next-generation EHR platform. She helped establish the mentorship program and the reward and recognition program for BayCare Information Services, a 700-member IT organization. Ms. Watts has worked at BayCare for more than a decade, rising from systems analyst for revenue cycle applications to her current role.

Leigh Williams. Vice President and CIO at Augusta Health (Fishersville, Va.). Ms. Williams was promoted to vice president and CIO of Augusta Health, a 255-bed community-owned health system, in 2025 after serving as assistant CIO. She oversees all IT functions, including clinical engineering, informatics and information security, for a system serving more than 300,000 people across seven counties in western and central Virginia. Ms. Williams led the technology planning, workflow design and system integration of more than 200 technology solutions, enabling Augusta Health to offer cardiology, gastroenterology, thoracic surgery, infectious disease, urgent care and primary care services locally. She also played a central role in building the digital infrastructure for a Medicare-approved ACO encompassing 410 providers and serving more than 8,400 patients. Ms. Williams is leading the enterprisewide implementation of Meditech Expanse as the system’s core EHR platform. Alongside the rollout, she launched the “Care Reimagined” change campaign, which targets clinician administrative burden, patient care journeys and technology investments that deliver value to the community. Ms. Williams is president of the Virginia chapter of the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society for 2025-26 and has served on the chapter’s board since 2016.

Companies

Pedram Afshar, MD, PhD. Founder and CEO at Escher Health (Oakland, Calif.). Dr. Afshar founded Escher Health to apply AI to patient financial access, helping hospitals, health systems, federally qualified health centers and health plans simplify eligibility and enrollment for Medicaid, charity care, 340B-related programs, Affordable Care Act marketplace plans and other safety-net programs. He leads the company’s product strategy, technology innovation, customer partnerships and long-term vision. Under his leadership, Escher Health has helped more than 100,000 individuals enroll in Medicaid and other safety-net programs. At Egg Harbor Township, N.J.-based AtlantiCare, the company helped double completed Medicaid applications, delivered a 15x return on investment and generated $12 million in incremental revenue in the first year. At St. Peter’s University Hospital in New Brunswick, N.J., the organization realized $13.4 million in additional revenue, assisted 162% more patients and improved staff efficiency by 40%. Yale New Haven (Conn.) Health most recently selected Escher Health to proactively connect eligible patients with Medicaid coverage. Dr. Afshar also teaches in Stanford University’s biodesign program.

Elizabeth Anderson, MSN, RN. Director of Clinical Experience and Solutions at Rauland (Prospect, Ill.). Ms. Anderson has served as director of clinical experience and solutions at Rauland since August 2021, contributing to product direction and roadmap planning for the company’s Responder Enterprise clinical communication platform. She also informs go-to-market positioning, supports customer engagements across North America and international markets and serves as the clinical voice in cross-functional discussions on workflow design, interoperability and outcomes measurement. Products developed with her clinical input earned MedTech Breakthrough awards for best clinical administration hardware in 2024 and 2025. Ms. Anderson advocates for using nurse call data, including patient requests, response times, staff movement and escalation patterns, as a source of operational intelligence to inform clinical decision-making. She worked as a critical care nurse at NorthShore University HealthSystem in Evanston, Ill. and Rush University Medical Center in Chicago from 2009 to 2017 and taught nursing as an associate professor at Oakton Community College. Before joining Rauland, Ms. Anderson was a clinical account manager at Philips from 2017 to 2021. She sits on the AONL Foundation corporate advisory council and has published articles, appeared on podcasts, and spoken at healthcare technology events on nurse-driven technology governance and workforce redesign.

Cliff Bell. Senior Director of Value Realization at Xsolis (Franklin, Tenn.). Mr. Bell leads Xsolis’ value realization partners team, which works with health system clients to maximize return on investment across the company’s solutions, including its Dragonfly platform, reporting, services and length-of-stay tools such as Dragonfly Navigate. He joined Xsolis in January 2021 as director of payer services, building the payer function’s workflows and training before moving into account management. Since 2021, Xsolis has grown from 23 payer connections to more than 850 across 25 health plans, and more than two-thirds of its health system clients are now connected to one or more payer partners. Mr. Bell was a key contributor to the Precision Utilization Management solution, which lets payers use the AI-enabled care level score to automate case reviews with connected hospitals and health systems based on historical alignment data, and he helped develop payer mapping within the Dragonfly platform. He also contributed to the Revenue Integrity Insights solution, which processes appeals data to help clients trace denials to their root causes. Under his leadership, the client service function was reshaped into the value realization partners team, and Xsolis reports a 95% client retention rate and an average return on investment of five to seven times for clients. Mr. Bell helped launch the Healthcare Financial Management Association’s executive revenue integrity council in December 2023 and now serves as its primary point of contact, helping design curriculum and plan its quarterly meetings.

Ritu Bhatnagar. Founder, President and COO at Neolytix (Chicago). Ms. Bhatnagar founded Neolytix, a healthcare management services organization, in 2012, and the company now serves more than 270 organizations across 31 specialties and 40 states. She leads all client delivery, spanning revenue cycle management, credentialing and provider enrollment, medical coding audits, payer contract analytics and negotiation, patient access and accounts receivable management. Ms. Bhatnagar launched InCredibly, the company’s AI-powered credentialing platform, to automate error-prone steps in provider enrollment, a process in which practices waited 90 to 120 days for newly enrolled providers to see reimbursement. She also directs Neolytix’s payer analytics practice, which gives provider clients data on payer contract performance, denial trends and reimbursement benchmarks drawn from its client base. Ms. Bhatnagar manages a team of more than 250 professionals across delivery centers across the world, and the company maintains ISO 27001 certification and HIPAA compliance. Neolytix reports that its clients achieve clean claim rates above 96%, accounts receivable days under 60 and denial rate reductions of more than 40%. Before founding Neolytix, she worked in business decision analytics, accounts receivable management, billing software implementation and vendor management in healthcare settings.

Royce Cheng. Chief Technology Officer at Third Way Health (Los Angeles). Mr. Cheng oversees product, engineering, data, and IT and information security at Third Way Health and sets the technical direction for the company’s patient access platform. He built the company’s technical infrastructure and teams from the ground up and established its SOC 2-certified compliance program. Mr. Cheng leads development of the platform’s AI-enabled service co-pilot, automated eligibility verification workflows and appointment scheduling engine. In Third Way Health’s work with Graybill Medical Group, his system evaluates every patient interaction rather than spot-checking a small sample of calls. The Graybill engagement was associated with approximately $3 million in savings, a 50% reduction in front-office costs and a 24% reduction in no-shows. Patients experienced a 1.5% call abandonment rate, an average wait time of 20.2 seconds and a post-call satisfaction score of 4.8 out of 5. Before joining Third Way Health, Mr. Cheng was a product manager at Verily from 2021 to 2022 and a principal at The Chartis Group from 2013 to 2021.

Cynthia Church. Chief Strategy Officer at Xealth (Seattle). Ms. Church leads corporate strategy, strategic partnerships, business development and new market expansion at Xealth, which Samsung acquired in 2025. One of the company’s earliest executives, she helped guide Xealth from a startup spun out of Renton, Wash.-based Providence to its acquisition by Samsung. During her tenure, Xealth achieved more than 10-fold revenue growth in five years and diversified its business across health systems, pharmaceutical companies, health plans and employers. The company’s EHR-integrated platform now serves more than 500 U.S. hospitals, reaches more than 6 million patients, has delivered more than 27 million digital health assets and connects providers with more than 70 digital health solutions. Since the acquisition, Ms. Church has played a central role in shaping Samsung’s connected care strategy, aligning Xealth’s platform with Samsung’s wearable technologies so health systems can incorporate consumer-generated health data into clinical workflows. She also leads Xealth’s partner community, which enables health systems to discover, deploy, manage and measure digital health programs through existing clinical workflows. Previously, as executive director of the Pittsburgh-based UPMC Center for Connected Medicine, Ms. Church turned the center from a cost center into a thought leadership organization generating approximately $2 million in annual sponsorship revenue and launched commercialization strategies that generated more than $300 million in strategic business opportunities.

Michael Dale. Director of Product Management and Revenue Cycle Management at Inovalon (Bowie, Md.). Mr. Dale leads a product management team at Inovalon responsible for claims management solutions for the commercial and Medicare markets, an advanced analytics platform and the company’s AI strategy for provider software. He led the launch of “Claim Denial Predictions,” Inovalon’s first AI-powered feature for provider software, which uses historical data to predict the likelihood of a claim denial before submission. Mr. Dale worked with sales teams and internal subject matter experts to fit the tool into existing billing workflows. His team has also expanded automation capabilities and improved claim submission and denial management workflows for Inovalon clients. Mr. Dale works across legal, implementation, client success, sales and engineering teams to coordinate product launches. He has more than a dozen years of experience in revenue cycle management and the clearinghouse space, including six years as a product manager at a healthcare revenue cycle clearinghouse. 

Senthilkumar Elangovan. Associate Vice President of Medical Coding at Vee Healthtek (Plano, Texas). Mr. Elangovan leads medical coding, the largest department at Vee Healthtek, overseeing its strategy, structure, quality and performance. He led the establishment of an IAO-accredited coding school that has trained more than 3,000 students and brought more than 400 coding professionals into the organization. In a city he identified as an overlooked talent market, Mr. Elangovan grew an operation from roughly 30 professionals to about 1,000, increasing monthly chart volume at that location from 70,000 to more than 1.84 million. Through the “Next-Gen Leaders” program he created, more than 120 high-potential coders have advanced into manager and executive roles at the company. Mr. Elangovan has kept attrition below 1%, compared with an industry norm of 3% to 4%, through skill-based promotions, certification sponsorship, cross-training and mentoring. He also leads the company’s AI innovation, embedding analytics, automation and AI-assisted coding into operations. A former clinician, Mr. Elangovan has spoken at more than 17 universities on business growth and building operations.

Zach Fain. Chief Technology Officer at Signature Performance (Omaha, Neb.). Mr. Fain leads technology strategy, IT operations, information security and program management at Signature Performance, which serves federal, public health, payer and provider clients. As a member of the company’s executive leadership team, he contributes to enterprise strategy, risk management, operational readiness and innovation planning. Mr. Fain helps lead the advancement of Signature’s technology-enabled service platforms, ClaimsXM and WorkflowXM, which support claims administration, configurable workflows, automation and decision logic. ClaimsXM has achieved FedRAMP Moderate Authorization, and publicly reported outcomes associated with the platform include a claims auto-adjudication rate of more than 94% and a two-day clean claim rate. Before joining Signature Performance, Mr. Fain served in healthcare administration and health IT leadership roles with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. As director of community care transformation within the VA’s office of community care, he helped establish the foundation for the implementation of the VA’s Community Care Network. He has more than 20 years of healthcare administration and health IT experience.

Josh Folds. Co-Founder and COO at Pivotal Health (Santa Monica, Calif.). Mr. Folds co-founded Pivotal Health and leads operations, product strategy and development of the company’s independent dispute resolution platform, which uses AI to help health systems, hospitals and physician groups pursue reimbursement for out-of-network care under the No Surprises Act. The platform helps providers identify eligible claims, determine reimbursement offers, generate position statements and supporting documentation and manage payer disputes within existing revenue cycle workflows. He also leads cross-functional collaboration across product, engineering, client success and business operations. Under Mr. Folds’ operational leadership, Pivotal serves more than 200 provider organizations nationwide and processes more than 150,000 independent dispute resolution claims per month. The company reports an 89% win rate across eligible cases, and AI-enabled workflow improvements have reduced document generation time by 87%. Before co-founding Pivotal, Mr. Folds was a private equity investor at The Cranemere Group and an investment banking associate and analyst at Barclays Investment Bank.

Mike Gao, MD. Co-Founder and CEO at SmarterDx (New York City). Dr. Gao co-founded SmarterDx in 2020 and oversees product, engineering, clinical operations and go-to-market strategy for the clinical AI company. Under his leadership, SmarterDx has expanded from a single product into a platform spanning clinical notes, utilization management and denials management. The company has grown to nearly 600 employees and serves 85 health system clients across more than 300 hospital sites. SmarterDx is on track to deliver $1.8 billion in client value by the end of 2026, according to the nomination. Dr. Gao has secured multiple funding rounds, including a $50 million Series B led by Transformation Capital in 2024 and strategic investment from New Mountain Capital in 2025. He also serves as CEO of Smarter Technologies, a role he has held since 2025. Before founding SmarterDx, Dr. Gao was assistant professor in medicine and medical director for transformation at Weill Cornell Medicine and NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital in New York City from 2017 to 2019.

Christopher Gengo. Senior Vice President and Chief Innovation Officer at HiLabs (Bethesda, Md.). Mr. Gengo joined HiLabs as senior vice president and chief innovation officer in January 2026 and works with product, engineering and go-to-market teams to translate health plan operational challenges into platform capabilities. He previously spent nearly seven years at CareSource, most recently as vice president of operations, overseeing provider data management, grievances and appeals, enrollment, benefit coding, configuration, payment integrity and operations data. Operational improvements under his leadership contributed to CareSource’s expansion into seven additional markets from 2022 to 2026. Before CareSource, Mr. Gengo spent nine years at Baylor Scott & White Health Plan, rising from director of Amisys configuration to vice president of operations. There, he increased the plan’s auto-adjudication rate from 74.8% to 91% in under two years. He also reduced average end-of-day claims inventory from 60,000 to 500, cut penalties and interest by more than 98% and raised first-pass processing accuracy to more than 99.4%. Mr. Gengo has worked across commercial, Medicare and Medicaid lines of business, and on various healthcare platforms.

Fletcher Hall. Vice President of Sales at HiLabs (Bethesda, Md.). Mr. Hall leads new business growth across the health plan market for HiLabs and also oversees the company’s marketing function. He shapes go-to-market strategy for new and existing products, working with product and engineering teams on launches, pricing models and packaging for different health plan segments. His responsibilities include developing strategic payer partnerships, managing the sales pipeline from early-stage prospecting through closed deals and setting revenue targets for the sales organization. Mr. Hall brings nearly two decades of experience driving software-as-a-service growth across healthcare and financial services. Most recently, he served as vice president of strategic payer partnerships at Medallion, where he played a major role in the go-to-market launch of CredAlliance. He previously held senior sales and partnership roles at various other software companies, often landing between 110% and 145% of revenue goals. At Advent Software, he rose from business development representative to senior account executive, managing more than 300 of the firm’s largest asset management and registered investment adviser relationships.

Ronnie Hastings. Director of Business Development at SunKnowledge (New York). Mr. Hastings leads business development for SunKnowledge, a healthcare revenue cycle management services company, where he drives client acquisition, provider partnerships and revenue growth. He works with physician groups, hospitals, ambulatory surgery centers, durable medical equipment providers and specialty practices to improve financial performance through revenue cycle operations. Mr. Hastings develops go-to-market strategies for new service lines, including prior authorization, virtual healthcare assistance, denial management, accounts receivable recovery and complex out-of-network reimbursement programs. He has also served as director of strategic operations at SunKnowledge, overseeing operational growth initiatives and virtual assistance programs.

Amy Ho. Chief Systems and Informatics Officer at Integrative Emergency Services (Dallas). Dr. Ho is the executive lead for EHRs, clinical data and analytics, revenue cycle technology and enterprise AI strategy at Integrative Emergency Services, a physician-owned organization with more than 1,800 clinicians that handles 2.2 million patient visits a year across 11 states. When she joined the organization, it had no centralized reporting presenting clinical care from the physician’s perspective, and she built that analytics function in-house. Dr. Ho holds seven Epic certifications and writes SQL across three database platforms. In 2022, she was invited to present to a national audience of physician executives on building a homegrown, physician-led analytics department, and she received the organization’s “John Marx Quality Award” in 2025 for her clinical analytics and quality work. She has published 14 peer-reviewed papers, including a two-step predictive model for early identification of emergency patients likely to have prolonged stays. Dr. Ho continues to practice as an attending emergency physician at two level 1 trauma centers in North Texas. She has given five TEDx talks, hosts the ACEP Nowcast and MedPage Today‘s Anamnesis podcasts, and serves on the editorial boards of Medscape and MedPage Today.

Caroline Hodge. CEO and Co-Founder at Dimer Health (Florham Park, N.J.). Ms. Hodge co-founded Dimer Health and sets its strategic vision across corporate strategy, product, fundraising, investor relations, national expansion and health system partnerships. She has led the creation of the company’s physician-led transitional care medicine model, which pairs licensed clinicians with AI to support patients after hospital discharge and reduce avoidable readmissions. Ms. Hodge led Dimer’s Series A fundraising, built a multidisciplinary team spanning clinical care, technology, operations and AI, and established partnerships with health systems across the country. In 2025, Dimer was named “Innovation Champion” of the Accenture HealthTech Innovation Challenge and became the first startup selected for two pilot programs through SciTech Scity’s “Innovation Engine,” including pilots with Jersey City (N.J.) Medical Center. Ms. Hodge participates in the Digital Medicine Society’s “Operationalizing AI Governance in Healthcare” Initiative and serves on the West Health Research HealthForce steering committee. Before co-founding Dimer, she worked as an emergency department physician assistant and held national vice president roles at DocGo and Envision Healthcare. She serves as the company’s primary spokesperson on financing rounds, strategic partnerships, product innovation and healthcare policy.

R. Lawrence Van Horn, PhD. Chief AI and Analytics Officer at Sentact (Nashville, Tenn.). Dr. Van Horn leads data and AI strategy at Sentact, whose platform is used by 60% of the top 20 U.S. health systems, converting the company’s clinical, safety, credentialing and malpractice data into decision-grade intelligence. He is responsible for integrating the data assets of the companies combined to form Sentact, including Hardenbergh Group, Preverity and National Credentialing Solutions, along with Performance Health Partners and the Vizient Patient Safety Organization, which joined in December 2025. Dr. Van Horn authored Sentact’s AI governance framework, which separates work AI can automate, such as chart abstraction and incident classification, from decisions that must remain human-accountable, such as peer review and credentialing determinations. He founded and served as CEO of Preverity, a risk prediction and patient safety platform for medical malpractice that Sentact acquired in 2025, and continues to direct its methodology for identifying clinicians and service lines at elevated risk of patient harm and malpractice loss. Dr. Van Horn is professor of economics and strategy, emeritus, at Vanderbilt University’s Owen Graduate School of Management, where he served as executive director of health affairs from 2006 to 2023, and his research has appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of Health Economics and the Stanford Law Review. In 2019, he spoke at the White House at the signing of Executive Order 13877 on healthcare price and quality transparency and at the announcement of the CMS hospital price transparency final rule. He has served on the board of Community Healthcare Trust since 2015, where he chairs the governance committee, and chairs the board of SaVida Health.

Sumit Kadakia. CEO and Co-Founder at Midstream Health (San Francisco). Mr. Kadakia co-founded Midstream Health, which continuously reconciles what health systems negotiated with what they purchased and were paid to surface underpayments, missed rebates and pricing errors. He directly oversees product, engineering, and value engineering and customer success. In less than three years, Mr. Kadakia grew Midstream into a company whose health system clients include Chicago-based CommonSpirit Health, Houston Methodist and New York City-based Mount Sinai, which together represent more than $88 billion in net patient revenue. Customers see value within 90 days of deployment, and Mount Sinai projected a fivefold return on investment at the outset of its partnership. Across its clients, Midstream has identified more than 1,500 cost-recovery opportunities this year and is on a path to capture $100 million in savings for clients by 2027. Before Midstream, Mr. Kadakia led operations and then the enterprise business at Truepill as it scaled from Series A through D, launching enterprise virtual pharmacy programs for organizations including Optum and Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drug Company. Earlier, at McKinsey & Company, he built an optimization engine that identified $100 million in annual savings for a natural gas company, and he co-founded food upcycling company Renewal Mill.

Cindy Klain. Chief Product and Strategy Officer at Accuity (Mount Laurel, N.J.). Ms. Klain joined Accuity in February 2026 as chief product and strategy officer, leading enterprise product management, corporate strategy, innovation and portfolio governance. She directs product strategy for Amplifi, Accuity’s physician-governed AI engine trained on more than 7 million physician-reviewed, payer-adjudicated inpatient charts. Last year, Amplifi reviewed 805,000 charts, a 340% year-over-year increase. Accuity partners with more than 400 hospitals, including four of the 10 largest U.S. health systems, and has delivered more than $3.3 billion in revenue lift. Before joining Accuity, Ms. Klain served as senior vice president and general manager of administrative software and of medical and dental networks at Optum from 2023 to 2025. She previously held product leadership roles at Change Healthcare from 2016 to 2023, rising from director of product management to senior vice president and general manager of medical network. She began her career at GE Healthcare, where she held product and operational leadership roles from 1995 to 2016.

Chase Koger. Director of Revenue Cycle at Synergen Health (Dallas). Mr. Koger helps direct revenue cycle management for Synergen Health, a revenue cycle technology and services firm serving labs, hospitals, health systems, physician groups and ambulatory surgery centers. He leads client engagements spanning charge capture and coding through denials, appeals and accounts receivable recovery, working directly with provider executives on strategy and day-to-day execution. Since joining Synergen in 2023, Mr. Koger has led revenue cycle transformations for health systems, specialty practices and ambulatory organizations, advancing from senior manager to director in roughly a year. He has helped clients deploy AI-enabled denial management and guides the firm’s internal initiatives in AI adoption, digital patient engagement and ambulatory surgery center performance benchmarking. Mr. Koger also mentors junior consultants and analysts. He holds Epic’s resolute professional billing certification and the Healthcare Financial Management Association’s certified revenue cycle representative designation. Before joining Synergen, he was a manager at PwC, where he led financial transformation for national health systems, and he held earlier roles at Navigant and Cerner.

Netanel Lederer. Director of Actuarial Services at Arbital Health (San Francisco). Mr. Lederer leads client relationships for multiple value-based care accounts at Arbital Health, including health plans, provider groups, ACOs and healthcare technology companies. His work covers risk adjustment, benchmarking, medical cost performance reviews, market sizing and outcome evaluations across Medicare Advantage, ACO REACH, the Medicare Shared Savings Program and Medicaid. Mr. Lederer led the development and launch of “Arbital ATLAS,” a platform that lets provider groups and ACOs model financial benchmarks under CMS’ new long-term enhanced ACO design model. He also reviews the actuarial logic behind Arbital’s actuarial AI tool, working with product and engineering teams so its outputs are explainable and clinically grounded. Mr. Lederer developed approaches to benchmarking, risk adjustment, medical cost forecasting, outcomes evaluation and value-based payment modeling that began as client work and are now used across the organization. In 2023, he won first place in the Society of Actuaries’ Entrepreneurial & Innovation Article Contest for “AI and EMRs: Pioneering the New Frontier in Healthcare Actuarial Practice.” He previously served as senior actuary at Arbital and held actuarial roles at Honest Health, Baltimore-based Johns Hopkins HealthCare, EmblemHealth and Anthem.

Steve Liou. CEO and Founder at Clarium (New York City). Mr. Liou founded Clarium in May 2020, during the Covid-19 pandemic, after watching hospitals struggle to secure personal protective equipment, drugs and equipment amid supplier constraints and a lack of real-time data. The company develops AI-enabled platforms that unify health system supply chain data across disparate systems, build a digital map of operations and use agentic AI to expedite manual tasks. As CEO, Mr. Liou oversees product development, engineering, analytics, customer success, marketing and sales, and he leads recruiting and hiring of the company’s key employees. Clarium serves more than 20 health system customers, including Oakland, Calif.-based Kaiser Permanente, Chicago-based CommonSpirit Health, New York City-based Mount Sinai and Yale New Haven (Conn.) Health. Under Mr. Liou’s leadership, the company has tripled its revenue each year since 2023, and customers have reduced disruption time by more than 70%. He has led Clarium through multiple funding rounds, most recently a $27 million series A led by Northzone. Before founding Clarium, Mr. Liou spent 15 years as an investor, including roles in healthcare investment banking at JPMorgan, at venture capital fund WFD Ventures and as a portfolio manager at Millennium Management.

Max Mangum. Co-Founder and CEO at Pivotal Health (Santa Monica, Calif.). Mr. Mangum co-founded Pivotal Health to help providers navigate the independent dispute resolution process for out-of-network reimbursement under the No Surprises Act. He oversees the company’s strategy, partnerships, customer growth, fundraising and organizational development and helps shape its product roadmap. Pivotal’s platform helps providers identify eligible claims, navigate independent dispute resolution requirements and automate administrative work while maintaining human oversight. Under Mr. Mangum’s leadership, Pivotal has grown to support more than 200 provider organizations nationwide. The company processes more than 150,000 IDR claims per month and reports an 89% win rate across eligible independent dispute resolution cases. Mr. Mangum works with provider organizations, industry partners and healthcare leaders on independent dispute resolution policy and reimbursement processes. Before founding Pivotal, he was a private equity investor at The Cranemere Group and worked in investment banking at Barclays Investment Bank.

Shantanu Nigam. Co-Founder and CEO at Vitea (Johns Creek, Ga.). Mr. Nigam co-founded Vitea, a healthcare AI governance company founded in 2025, and sets its strategic vision, product direction, go-to-market strategy and partnership priorities. Under his leadership, Vitea provides health systems with real-time guardrails on AI prompts and responses across the enterprise, along with continuous monitoring designed to detect deployed models drifting toward bias or unsafe behavior. He works directly with CIOs, CISOs and compliance leaders to move their organizations from committee-based, spreadsheet-driven governance toward automated policy enforcement at the point of use. Mr. Nigam previously co-founded and served as CEO of Jvion, a prescriptive clinical AI company focused on preventing avoidable patient harm. Under his leadership, Jvion grew from inception to more than $18 million in software-as-a-service annual recurring revenue with less than $8 million in invested capital, served more than 400 hospitals and payers, and reached more than 2.5 million patients before its 2019 exit to private equity. After Jvion, he co-founded SeedtoB Capital, where he serves as managing partner and invests in early-stage health AI companies. Earlier in his career, Mr. Nigam was a senior manager in the management consulting arm of Accenture’s Health and Life Sciences practice.

Chandresh Patel. CEO and Co-Founder at Bacancy Technology (New Jersey). Mr. Patel founded Bacancy Technology in 2011 without external funding and has grown it from a single-person venture to more than 1,050 engineers across nine global offices, opening its North American operations in 2017. He holds direct accountability for the company’s healthcare technology practice, which serves U.S. providers, health tech companies and payers across health IT systems and revenue cycle operations. His teams deliver EHR development, Epic and Cerner engineering, interoperability and clinical workflow automation, while the revenue cycle practice spans five service lines, including medical billing, claims management, medical coding and prior authorization software. In one medical billing and practice management engagement, Bacancy reduced claim processing time by 35% and increased collections by 22% within six months of go-live. A telemedicine platform the company built supports 25,000 remote consultations monthly at 99.9% uptime, and a patient engagement platform it developed improved follow-up rates by 42%. Bacancy delivered 18 healthcare solutions over a two-year period, including a HIPAA-compliant patient portal completed in less than four months. Mr. Patel has coached more than 100 organizations on agile practices.

Heidi Raines. Chief Strategy Officer at Sentact (Nashville, Tenn.). Ms. Raines leads enterprise strategy, platform integration and long-term innovation at Sentact, focusing on patient safety, quality, experience and compliance across the company’s clinical operations platform. She founded Performance Health Partners in 2015 and served as its CEO, growing the company’s cloud-based safety platform to a 97% client retention rate and annual growth rates of up to 75%. Performance Health Partners was ranked No. 1 in the “Best in KLAS” report for healthcare safety, risk and compliance software for four consecutive years, including 2026. Ms. Raines led the transition after Sentact, which serves 60% of the top 20 U.S. health systems, acquired Performance Health Partners in late 2025, and she moved into her current role at the combined company. She is the author of “Shared Voices: A Framework for Patient and Employee Safety in Healthcare,” which became a Forbes and Amazon bestseller. Earlier in her career, Ms. Raines worked as a healthcare administrator at LSU Health Sciences Center New Orleans and co-founded Audubon Labs and New Orleans-based Vivere Audubon Medical Center, where she remains a co-owner and executive board member. She also serves as preceptor faculty in Tulane University’s Master of Health Administration program.

Mordechai Raskas, MD. CMIO at Avo (New York City). Dr. Raskas leads Studio, the clinical content organization of clinical AI platform Avo, overseeing the clinician-builders who design and build its clinical decision support and documentation modules. He built and scaled the Studio group and created Avo’s clinical builder certification program to standardize how clinicians are trained to develop AI-powered clinical content. Dr. Raskas also established the Studio governance framework, including processes for roadmap prioritization, quality assurance, versioning and clinical safety review across all modules. He led development of Avo’s evaluation and management and current procedural terminology coding optimization tools, which improved billing by 16% and reduced billing corrections by 87%, according to internal results. With Avo’s co-founder, he co-leads development of the company’s inpatient module suite, including admission, rounding and discharge workflows built to clinical documentation integrity-enhanced and billing-aware standards. During his tenure, Avo has grown into an enterprise AI platform used by more than 42,000 clinicians across more than 600 sites of care and added partnerships with MCG and DynaMed. Dr. Raskas previously served as chief medical officer of MassLight and as CMIO and director of telemedicine at PM Pediatric Care from 2016 to 2025.

Hass Saad, MD. Chief Clinical Officer for Paragon at Altera Digital Health (Niagara Falls, N.Y.). Dr. Saad leads clinical strategy for Paragon Denali, Altera Digital Health’s EHR platform for community, rural and critical-access hospitals, working across product development, engineering, sales, marketing and client success. He joined Altera in 2024 and has helped advance the company’s clinical AI strategy through initiatives including ambient clinical documentation, intelligent workflow automation and advanced interoperability. Dr. Saad served as Altera’s clinical representative in the CMS “Kill the Clipboard” initiative, advocating for point-of-care interoperability that lets clinicians securely access and reconcile outside patient records. He also partners with health system leaders during executive discovery, strategic demonstrations and digital transformation initiatives. Before joining Altera, Dr. Saad founded DMI Advisory, a physician-led health IT consulting firm, and over a decade grew it to support nearly 100 health systems and more than 10,000 physicians through a network of more than 200 physician consultants. The firm supported organizations including Baltimore-based University of Maryland Medical Center, Worcester, Mass.-based UMass Memorial, Cook Children’s Hospital in Fort Worth, Texas, Barnes-Jewish Hospital in St. Louis and Boston-based Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Dr. Saad exited the business following its acquisition and continues to serve as a strategic advisor to DMI Advisory.

Robin Sievert. Vice President of Revenue Cycle Management Operations at WebPT (Phoenix). Ms. Sievert oversees WebPT’s revenue cycle operations for rehabilitation therapy practices, leading a team of 400 people with six direct reports. Over the past two and a half years, she has shifted the company’s revenue cycle operations from a reactive to a proactive approach focused on operational efficiency, revenue optimization and collections for WebPT’s clients. Ms. Sievert spearheaded the creation of WebPT RCM’s dedicated revenue integrity team, which aligned charge master management, payment variance improvement and denial prevention workflows into a unified strategy. Under her direction, WebPT achieved a 15% improvement in days in accounts receivable, reduced aged accounts receivable older than 90 days by 22% and decreased claim denials by 15%. A certified coder, Ms. Sievert also mentors team members to prepare them for future leadership roles. Before joining WebPT, she spent 24 years at NextGen Healthcare, advancing from accounts receivable representative to vice president of operations for revenue cycle management. 

Melissa Soliz. Partner and Leader of Health Data Interoperability and Technology Practice at Coppersmith Brockelman (Phoenix). Ms. Soliz leads Coppersmith Brockelman’s health data interoperability and technology practice, advising providers, payers, health information networks and exchanges, health IT companies and data analytics firms on privacy and interoperability law. Her work spans HIPAA, 42 C.F.R. Part 2, the ONC Information Blocking Rule, CMS interoperability mandates and national and state data-sharing frameworks such as Carequality. She has helped clients design and operate data-sharing platforms, including patient record-matching systems for quality measures and risk adjustment, consent management engines for highly regulated data, patient access application programming interfaces and clinical and community information exchanges. Ms. Soliz also represents organizations in information-blocking disputes, network audits and regulatory investigations and negotiates high-value technology transactions. She co-chairs the Sequoia Project’s “Interoperability Matters Privacy & Consent Workgroup,” co-chaired its Information Blocking Rule Toolkit Task Group from 2023 to 2024 and was named the Sequoia Project’s “Volunteer of the Year” in 2024. Ms. Soliz serves as president of the Arizona Society of Healthcare Attorneys and is a member of the Carequality advisory council. She is recognized by Chambers USA in Arizona healthcare and in nationwide privacy and data security for healthcare, and she earned Chambers “Global” recognition in 2026.

Levan Sulakvelidze. Founder, President and CEO at Medmio (San Diego). Mr. Sulakvelidze founded Medmio, an AI medical billing and coding platform for outpatient practices, in 2022 and owns its product direction, system architecture, regulatory posture and go-to-market strategy. Medmio’s coding engine, “CodeSight,” reads clinical notes and returns clinical codes with a confidence score, routing low-confidence charts to human coders rather than submitting them. He wrote and maintains a public accuracy benchmark for CodeSight built on 945 billed office-visit encounters, in which the system finalized 92.9% of condition and symptom codes without human review while holding the automated subset at or above 95% accuracy. Mr. Sulakvelidze has scaled the platform to more than 90 providers and delivered $355,000 a year in cost savings to its first enterprise client, cutting charge lag by 4.7 days in the first month of adoption. Before founding Medmio, he spent six years at Greenbelt, Md.-based Center for Vascular Medicine, rising from medical scribe to director of healthcare delivery and founding the organization’s first analytics function, which he grew to four data scientists. There, he built a patient follow-up automation platform that recovered $4.1 million in otherwise-lost revenue in 2023 and a quality-measure tracking system that earned a 100% MIPS score two consecutive years and secured $800,000 in CMS bonus payments. Mr. Sulakvelidze has also authored 12 peer-reviewed publications, four as first author.

Stacie Sutter. Vice President of Payer Strategy at Ensemble (Cincinnati). Ms. Sutter leads Ensemble’s payer strategy function, which helps 37 health systems representing $55 billion in net patient revenue anticipate reimbursement risk before it affects cash flow. Her team translates payer policy changes, including more than 180 new payment requirements and updates logged daily in Ensemble’s proprietary “EIQ” platform, into playbooks for denials prevention, contract strategy, utilization management response, out-of-network strategy and appeals. In 2026, her team’s interventions delivered more than $76.3 million in confirmed payments to Ensemble’s clients, with another $35 million in progress or projected. Ensemble’s electronic prior authorization work with one health system and payer drove 88% of accounts and 92% of authorization decisions to touchless processing, reduced decision turnaround from three days to one hour and kept the denial rate below 2%. Ms. Sutter serves as Ensemble’s external voice on payer dynamics and has been interviewed by The Washington Post on Medicare’s AI-driven prior authorization model and by U.S. News & World Report on payer strategy. She previously served as associate vice president of payer strategy and senior director of payer performance at Ensemble and as director of managed care at Owensboro (Ky.) Health. Ms. Sutter has also served as adjunct faculty at Western Kentucky University since 2013.

Sandie Sutton. Chief Revenue Cycle Officer at Physician Care Coordination Consultants (Louisville, Ky.). Ms. Sutton leads the design and execution of client revenue cycle strategies at PC3 Health, addressing inpatient and outpatient denials, managing prior authorizations and optimizing coding accuracy. Since joining the company three years ago, she has built its revenue cycle division from the ground up, growing the team from two to 38 members. She develops and implements the operational processes needed to stand up clients’ revenue cycle functions and takes part in business development meetings and executive business reviews with prospective and existing clients. Ms. Sutton also monitors payer policies, coding updates and CMS guidelines affecting hospital revenue cycle operations. She began her healthcare career as a surgical intensive care unit nurse, spending a decade in direct patient care before moving into hospital revenue cycle operations. Before joining PC3 Health, Ms. Sutton held roles at Louisville-based Baptist Healthcare Systems, including associate vice president of denials management, system director of revenue integrity, assistant director of revenue integrity and lead compliance nurse.

Jessica Tucker. Vice President of Operations at Healthcare Partners Consulting and Billing (Atlanta). Ms. Tucker leads day-to-day revenue cycle operations for Healthcare Partners Consulting and Billing’s provider clients nationwide, overseeing intake workflows, benefits and eligibility verification, claims submission, payment posting, denial management and accounts receivable follow-up. She has implemented standardized processes across intake, eligibility verification, claims submission and accounts receivable follow-up, replacing fragmented workflows with a structured revenue cycle system. Ms. Tucker developed internal accountability frameworks, including structured reporting, workflow tracking and escalation processes, that allow leadership to track performance across teams and client accounts and identify gaps in real time. She analyzes trends in claims, denials and payer behavior to correct root causes systemwide, work aimed at improving front-end claim accuracy, reducing downstream denials and lowering aged accounts receivable. Ms. Tucker manages a remote team of billing specialists, intake coordinators and support staff, overseeing training, performance management and capacity planning. She also leads operational onboarding for new clients, using structured processes designed to identify risks early and establish sustainable billing processes.

Zach Veigulis. Co-Founder and Chief AI Officer at Claimable (Sacramento, Calif.). Mr. Veigulis co-founded Claimable in 2023 and leads the company’s AI strategy, technical roadmap and product development for its insurance appeal platform. He designed the platform’s AI architecture, which integrates more than 1.5 million clinical studies, 11,500 clinical guidelines, 2,100 health plan policies and 500 federal and state laws and regulations to generate customized, evidence-based appeals in minutes. Under his technical leadership, the platform has achieved a success rate of 80% or higher in established conditions, with most appeals resolved in about 10 days. Since Claimable launched its enterprise platform in October 2025, the company has deployed nine live programs across pharmaceutical manufacturers, specialty pharmacies, patient support hubs and health systems. Mr. Veigulis has guided integrations with EHRs, revenue cycle management platforms and hub workflows that allow 95% of sponsored program appeals to be completed without staff intervention, and the platform has helped recover more than $35 million in previously denied care. Before co-founding Claimable, he spent more than a decade at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, most recently as chief data scientist at the National Center for Collaborative Healthcare Innovation, where he developed machine learning systems for clinical decision support and published research on Covid-19 patient outcomes in PLOS ONE. He also served as a lecturer in business analytics at the University of Iowa Tippie College of Business from 2022 to 2025.

Sophia Wagner. Vice President of Product Engineering at Phreesia (Wilmington, Del.). Ms. Wagner leads a group of about 70 employees across product management, engineering and operations supporting Phreesia’s payments and provider financing businesses. Her portfolio includes payment facilitation and processing, financing, patient payments, and patient billing and statements, representing nearly $5 billion in annual payment processing volume across 180 million annual patient visits in fiscal 2026. She also leads payment facilitator merchant processing and payment operations and supports the development of Phreesia’s provider financing capabilities following the company’s acquisition of AccessOne. Earlier at Phreesia, as director of market development, Ms. Wagner created the strategy to launch a new market segment before the company’s initial public offering. She later led a team of directors responsible for segment growth and retention during a two-year period in which Phreesia’s total revenue increased 67% and its payment processing volume grew from $2.8 billion to nearly $4 billion. Ms. Wagner also managed due diligence for a $38 million acquisition. She previously served as senior director of product management and senior director of market development at Phreesia and as product and commercial lead at Cerner, and she mentors colleagues through Phreesia’s formal mentorship employee resource group.

Malinka Walaliyadde. CEO and Co-Founder at AKASA (South San Francisco, Calif.). Mr. Walaliyadde co-founded Akasa and oversees the company’s strategy, product vision and health system partnerships, including with Cleveland Clinic, Rochester, Minn.-based Mayo Clinic, New York City-based NewYork-Presbyterian and Durham, N.C.-based Duke. He introduced the company’s approach of building customized large language models trained on each hospital’s own clinical and financial data, which help coding and clinical documentation teams identify missed documentation opportunities before claims are submitted. Under his leadership, the company has grown more than tenfold since launching its suite of generative AI products for the middle revenue cycle in mid-2024. The company’s customer base now represents more than $160 billion in aggregate net patient revenue across U.S. health systems, and the company reports delivering more than $100 million in annual value for one customer. Before Akasa, Mr. Walaliyadde was a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, where he helped build the firm’s healthcare investment practice, and held roles at Corning Life Sciences, Counsyl and Deloitte. He speaks regularly at industry events, including the Healthcare Financial Management Association’s annual conference.

Charlene Wang. CEO and Co-Founder at Ember AI (San Francisco). Ms. Wang co-founded Ember AI, a revenue integrity and compliance platform for healthcare providers, and leads its strategic direction, product development, fundraising and key partnerships. The company uses AI to identify revenue and compliance risk before claims are submitted, with a focus on preventing denials rather than relying on downstream rework. Under her leadership, Ember was accepted into Y Combinator’s Winter 2024 cohort and raised a $4.3 million seed round led by Nexus Venture Partners in 2025. Ms. Wang works directly with health systems and specialty practices to align the platform with revenue cycle operations and payer requirements. She has advocated a prevention-first, human-in-the-loop approach to AI in revenue integrity. Ms. Wang speaks regularly on revenue integrity, compliance and AI, including as a panelist at JPM Healthcare Week events and at Y Combinator-hosted healthcare and AI panels. Before co-founding Ember, she was a product manager at Google.

The post 72 health IT & revenue cycle up-and-comers | 2026 appeared first on Becker's Hospital Review | Healthcare News & Analysis.