The Union Healthcare Insight research team recently got together in Chicago with an experienced group of health system leaders, technologists, and consultants to dig into some of our latest research: “Six insights for revenue cycle leaders in 2026” . It was an open and generative day of discussion where attendees had the chance to sit with some hard questions facing the industry, knock around some practical ideas for moving the needle on their most stubborn challenges, and en

In our January post , we covered the structure of the ACCESS model—its four clinical tracks, its outcome-aligned payment (OAP) logic, and the questions that remained unanswered (chiefly, what the payment amounts are and what the improvement targets are) as applications opened. Well, we now have some answers. CMS just released 21 pages of more detail  about ACCESS model payments and targets for the first performance period (July 5, 2026-December 31, 2027). And on February 12,

Practically every organization in every sector of healthcare routinely needs market-sizing models to guide high-stakes strategic decisions, such as where to invest and where to be cautious. The problem: In the rush to check all the planning boxes, it is all too easy for leaders to accidentally end up with—and even bet the strategy on—'models' that are not really models at all, but simply numbers . Numbers with unexamined, opaque, and sometimes wildly inaccurate underlying as

January 2026 has slipped away like a Nor'easter through the Northeast—fast, furious, and leaving everyone wondering what just happened. And much like those of you who got snowed in, we've spent the month mostly indoors, heads down, reading everything we could get our hands on about the flurry of health industry and policy developments that have swept through Washington and across the healthcare landscape. Let's go around the horn and touch on just a sliver of what our team h

Ahead of our 2026 Revenue Cycle Summit in Chicago, we've been chatting with many executives and board members about how their health systems are transforming their operations for 2026. Interestingly, a common ambition seems to be on everyone's radar: squeezing more out of existing vendor arrangements . The questions many are pondering are flavors of: "Should we demand more from our current vendors or make wholesale changes?" And, while all types of vendors roll into this con

An Interview with Brendan Keeler, AKA 'Health API Guy' Over the next few years, we all need to be tracking a new and highly active front in Health IT innovation and change: The emergence of an “individual access layer” that lets patients control how their data moves across tools and apps—and all the related healthcare industry ecosystem opportunities and risks that come that new infrastructure. I’m talking about a new class of players, known as Individual Access Services (IA

Agentic AI in healthcare has rapidly become the centerpiece of health tech discussions. We’ve been studying it because it’s an area of rapid growth and advancement—an outlier in this moment in healthcare, when stakeholders across the industry are struggling amidst rising expenses, workforce shortages, and patient experience frustrations. Agentic AI tools are being positioned as a game-changing approach to addressing many of the industry’s biggest challenges, given their state

All U.S. health systems, hospitals, provider groups, life sciences organizations, and national or regional payers are racing to scale AI....

Last week, Union Healthcare Insight had the privilege of gathering with an impressive group of hospital revenue cycle executives in...

AI scribes for clinicians are clearly a compelling idea—but to what extent are adoption and results matching up? It can be hard to tell,...

In the last couple of months, we’ve been pulling up chairs with dozens of revenue cycle leaders to understand what’s keeping them awake...

Quick rewind: our tour of the clinical data market that ended in a cliffhanger In Part 1 of this blog post (linked below if you missed...