For those in healthcare, and revenue cycle especially, your newsfeeds undoubtedly provide a consistent stream of stories illustrating abundant payer-provider friction.  Few would argue the most visible of these tensions has been around health system and clinician reimbursement for services, which has catalyzed a rapid investment into AI-tech on both sides, often described by one of many possible wartime analogies, although yet to have reached the point that either party appea

All the major for‑profit health systems have hosted their fourth set of earnings calls for 2025, sharing both their Q4 2025 performance and their 2026 outlook. These players function as a near‑real‑time “dashboard” for demand, pricing power, cost pressures, and strategic bets across the delivery system—offering helpful intel on the direction of the healthcare industry as a whole (even if they occupy a somewhat unique position within the provider world, as we'll discuss more t

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

For so many mission and humanitarian reasons, let's all take it as a given that everyone in healthcare sees value in improving healthcare quality. And that, therefore, tools, services, resources, or process changes that improve quality will also be perceived as valuable and worth investing in. This is true enough; however, in the real world, it often happens that a more detailed quality ROI case has to be made. Both on the buyer (provider, payer) side and on the vendor (tech,

With a new federal measure set to reward hospitals for participating in the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality's (AHRQ) Patient Safety Organization (PSO) program starting next year—and a fresh government evaluation pushing for tweaks to the program to improve its effectiveness—PSOs have quickly moved from a relatively niche quality program to a potential strategy priority. PSOs play a strategic role by offering legal protections for safety event data and positioning o

For the better part of the last decade, rural hospitals have been running on thin ice. In 2025, that ice appears poised to splinter. Core...

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

The push toward healthcare price transparency started in earnest nearly 15 years ago, when the ACA highlighted the need for greater...