Organic Growth Podcast: Unlocking Stuck Revenue: How AI Is Fixing Healthcare's RCM Bottlenecks
Moving from acquisition-driven growth to true organic performance.
Recorded live at the McGuireWoods Healthcare Private Equity & Finance Conference, this episode of the Organic Growth Podcast explores one of the most persistent challenges in healthcare operations:
Revenue that gets stuck—and often written off.
Stewart Gandolf speaks with Brian Plamondon of SuperDial about how manual, phone-based workflows between providers and payers are slowing down revenue cycle management—and how AI is changing that.
From claims follow-ups to prior authorizations, this conversation highlights how automation is helping healthcare organizations recover revenue, reduce administrative burden, and scale more efficiently.
Why Listen?
- Understand where and why revenue gets stuck in the RCM process.
- Learn how AI is transforming payer-provider communication.
- Discover how automation can reduce backlogs and administrative burden.
- Explore ways to improve both top-line revenue and operational efficiency.
Key Insights and Takeaways
- “Lost” Revenue Is Often Just Stuck Revenue.
In many healthcare organizations, revenue isn’t truly lost—it’s delayed, buried in backlogs, or left uncollected due to lack of follow-up. Once claims age past a certain point, they’re often written off or outsourced, even though they may still be recoverable with the right processes in place. - Phone-Based Workflows Are the Biggest Bottleneck.
A major source of inefficiency in revenue cycle management is the reliance on manual, call-based interactions with payers. Tasks like claims follow-ups, prior authorizations, and benefit verification often require repeated phone calls, creating delays, inconsistencies, and high administrative costs. - AI Is Automating High-Friction RCM Tasks.
AI-powered voice solutions are now capable of handling these repetitive workflows at scale. By automating calls and data retrieval, organizations can reduce human error, improve consistency, and accelerate the speed at which claims are processed and resolved. - Staffing Constraints Limit Growth Without Automation.
Historically, the only way to manage increasing RCM complexity was to add headcount. But in today’s labor market, hiring and scaling call center teams is difficult and expensive. AI offers a way to augment—or even replace—manual processes, allowing organizations to grow without proportional increases in staffing.
5. AI Improves Both Cost Efficiency and Revenue Recovery.
Automation doesn’t just reduce costs—it also helps recover revenue that would otherwise go uncollected. By consistently following up on claims and navigating payer systems more efficiently, AI can unlock additional top-line revenue while improving margins.
6. RCM Is a Natural Entry Point for AI Transformation.
Because revenue cycle management touches nearly every part of the healthcare workflow—from patient intake to claims submission—it’s an ideal starting point for AI adoption. Improvements in RCM can have ripple effects across the entire organization.
7. The Future Points to Fully Automated Payer-Provider Communication.
Looking ahead, the vision is a system where AI interacts directly with AI—provider systems communicating with payer systems without human intervention. While still evolving, this shift has the potential to fundamentally transform how healthcare revenue is managed.
Brian Plamondon
Director of Partnerships, SuperDialSubscribe for More
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Note: The following AI-generated transcript is provided as an additional resource for those who prefer not to listen to the podcast recording. It has been lightly edited and reviewed for readability and accuracy.
Read the Full Transcript
Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): Welcome to the Healthcare Success Podcast, another edition of our McGuire-Woods Special Edition at the Private Equity and Healthcare Conference in partnership with our friends over at Levin Associates.
This interview, we're talking to Brian Plamondon with SuperDial. First of all, welcome, Brian.
Brian Plamondon (SuperDial): Thanks for having me, Stewart.
Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): So I think it'll help me as well as our audience to know a little bit more about SuperDial. What do you guys specialize in? And, you know, sort of the 60-second message so our listeners know where to start.
Brian Plamondon (SuperDial): Yeah, so SuperDial was born out of a revenue cycle management company specifically for behavioral health about five years ago. And our founders quickly realized the issue in revenue cycle management was the bottleneck of payer provider communication, which is often very call-based workflows. very slow burdensome administrative challenges there and so they built a solution a voice ai solution actually for prior authorization verification of benefits claims denials these things that have been struggles in the industry for you know as long as as ever right yeah um and you know we really have expanded our use case from just specifically revenue cycle companies to working directly with some provider groups.
We just signed our first payer as a customer as well which is really exciting for us. The goal would be to have RAI talk to RAI about all these issues and challenges in the next couple of years.
Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): So that's a huge growing industry, right, with the AI. So for all the different organizations you're working with, how does the revenue tend to get stuck? What are the challenges that your system helps overcome?
Brian Plamondon (SuperDial): Yeah, so there's a variety of ways this revenue can get stuck. A lot of it is just... follow-ups and backlogs, right? So folks at a big health system or even provider groups, after 30 days, 60 days of AR backlog, they'll just outsource it to a revenue cycle management company, let's say, and whatever they can, they eat what they kill, whatever they can pull in, they get a percentage of that.
But it's often just once it's been stuck and you haven't been able to follow up on a claim. or able to get that data from a payer, as an example, it's often just thought of as lost. And so we try and, you know, reduce that burden and being able to just automate that not only through our voice AI, but leveraging different clearinghouses and payer portals and really just bringing the entire revenue cycle data set into one place to help these companies. And often if they want to grow, it usually has always been grow by headcount.
And it's a tough hiring market, I think, in the customer service kind of space right now. And so we can help them augment that headcount growth as well, where the revenue does tend to get stuck sometimes just when you can't scale and have some of these complex claims get looked at by folks in a call center. And so is your business centered around pre-authorization or is it mostly claims denials? We do a little bit of everything. We do a little bit of everything. So certainly I would say claim status checks is where we started, but have started to go into denials. Prior authorizations is huge. And then verification of benefits as well. So you might see organizations that just need to constantly check and see what's covered by their health plan.
How many physical therapy appointments can I have and validating these things is always typically been phone-based and it can change year to year. So these things need to be validated.
Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): All right, that makes sense. So what parts of this are the most operationally challenging or intensive?
Brian Plamondon (SuperDial): Yeah, so it's really kind of what I alluded to and started with CERT. It's these phone-based workflows where it's operationally... you know what are the costs and inconsistencies that are you know held with some of these areas like prior authorization or claims follow-ups that you know you could even it's a lot of reading off a screen and humans are doing this for eight ten hours a day and might miss a number miss a letter and like these sort of things so from an operational standpoint we're able to really help you know automate some of that and like our AI is like exactly knows what the data is, and we're able to quickly get that back into systems, whether it just be their internal systems, EHR, EMR platforms, and kind of take that to the next best level and expedite some of the operational challenges.
Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): Is your software helping to get the claim in right the first time? Is that a big part of it?
Brian Plamondon (SuperDial): It can. It can for sure. Or certainly just like that follow-up, like I said. We've experienced firsthand, we've done five million calls as an organization. And I think one of the things that really resonates is sometimes payers can just hang up or you're not getting the information that's needed.
So if it takes one call or nine calls, we will figure out what it takes to get that information and our customers only pay based on completed transactions.
Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): Oh, that's interesting. So how are leading operators rethinking the manual process with like phone-based systems like
yours?
Brian Plamondon (SuperDial): Yeah, and I think it's a very, you know, we're at a private equity healthcare conference here. It's a very private equity-backed space. A lot of these MSOs, DSOs, even RCM companies often have private capital coming in. And so, you know, they're really thinking about it from a perspective of, you know, cost savings.
We might be able to come in at 50% ROI based on a call center employee, even if they're offshore, which is really compelling. But also top line, I think, is really critical, right? And as we continue to see margins get squeezed across the industry, if there's a way to increase that top line and there's AR that's been outstanding for a couple of months and we're able to clear that backlog, I think that's really interesting as well. to some of the operators in the space when it can be so competitive as bigger organizations scale and have hundreds, if not thousands of locations.
If you can put it all in a back office and really figure out how to scale, it's really compelling, I think.
Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): Great. How do people get in touch with you?
Brian Plamondon (SuperDial): Yeah. So SuperDial, you can find us online. We've got a great online presence and you can check out some of our customers there and their feedback. But I'm Brian Plamondon, Director of Partnerships. So you can find me, Brian, at SuperDial.com. But we'd love to have a conversation.
Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): Great. Cool. Thank you.
Brian Plamondon (SuperDial): Thanks, Stewart.
