< + > Bonus Features – August 23, 2026 – Epic announces real-time prior auth checks, 38% of orgs face weekly network or security disruptions, plus 23 more stories

Welcome to the weekly edition of Healthcare IT Today Bonus Features. This article will be a weekly roundup of interesting stories, product announcements, new hires, partnerships, research studies, awards, sales, and more. Because there’s so much happening out there in healthcare IT that we aren’t able to cover in our full articles, we still want to make sure you’re informed of all the latest news, announcements, and stories happening to help you better do your job.

Epic News 

• John Lynn was in Verona and covered a slew of announcements from Epic at UGM 2026. In addition, Epic announced real-time prior authorization checks (already live at four organizations) and Ergo Visit, an AI tool for outpatient visits (per Healthcare Dive), while Swank Patient Entertainment integrated its on-demand streaming service directly into MyChart Bedside TV.
• Meanwhile, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission is opening an antitrust investigation into Epic. The FTC is looking into how the company grants or withholds data access, according to Reuters. Neither Epic nor the FTC said much else.

Other News and Stats

• Not to be outdone, Oracle Health expanded its Clinical AI Agent with automated coding, dictation, and chart review for ambulatory workflows.
• A report from Nile found that 38% of healthcare organizations experience network or security disruptions at least weekly, while only 18% say they are comfortably managing network operations.
• The Sequoia Project will continue its role as the Recognized Coordinating Entity to support TEFCA implementation and received a  15% increase in funding under its existing contract with ONC.

Partnerships

• Care navigation vendor Bamboo Health announced a live bidirectional data-sharing partnership with the Texas Health Services Authority, which operates HIETexas.
• Patient communication technology from Luma Health is now integrated with Physician’s Computer Company’s pediatric EHR.

Products

• Aiva Health added ChatGPT for Healthcare, Claude for Healthcare, and Gemini Enterprise to its AI nursing assistant.
• Diligent Robotics rolled out Moxi 2.0, its delivery robot for hospitals.
• HHAeXchange launched CarePay, a payroll solution for homecare agencies.
• Inspiren expanded Inspiren eCall with Two-Way Voice, enabling senior living care teams to speak directly with a resident when an emergency call is placed.
• Motive Medical Intelligence expanded Practicing Wisely, its clinician performance measurement system, to include advanced practice providers and allied health professionals.
• Cardiac device management company Murj released the Murj Remote Patient Monitoring Platform.
• Net Health announced Chart Audit, a capability embedded in its Optima Unity EMR, which reviews rehab therapy documentation against compliance criteria before a clinician approves and signs the note.
• WellSky announced CareBrief and Patient Visibility Pro to help hospitals and health systems  maintain continuity of care beyond discharge.

Implementations

• GI Partners of Illinois selected Century Health as its partner for building a comprehensive real-world data ecosystem.
• Vivos Therapeutics is deploying Greenway Health‘s Novare platform across its clinics for treating sleep-related breathing disorders.
• Western Washington Medical Group implemented IKS Health‘s Scribble Select ambient scribe interface.
• Intermountain Health deployed Perimeter‘s Claire OCT System, which help surgeons see microscopic tissue structures during breast cancer surgery.
• Strategic Radiology is giving member practices gain preferred access to NewVue‘s radiology interpretation platform.

Company News

• ImpediMed received FDA clearance for its SOZO Digital Health Platform to be used to assess patients at risk of sarcopenia, a disease of low muscle mass or muscle loss.
• Speech therapy service provider Expressable joined Amazon’s Health Benefits Connector. Meanwhile, Penguin Ai’s Utilization Management and HCC Risk Adjustment solutions are now available in AWS Marketplace.

People

• Technology consultancy CitiusTech appointed Dhaval Shah as Acting CEO and Shyam Karunakaran as President.
• Interoperability platform Health Gorilla appointed Lidia Niecko-Najjum as Chief Legal Officer and Ryan Smith as Chief Technology Officer.
• Population health vendor Azara Healthcare appointed Ashley Basile as Chief Strategy Officer and Josh Taylor as Chief Revenue Officer.

If you have news that you’d like us to consider for a future edition of Healthcare IT Today Bonus Features, please submit them on this page. Please include any relevant links and let us know if news is under embargo. Note that submissions received after the close of business on Thursday may not be included in Bonus Features until the following week.

I’m going on vacation next week – in fact, as you read this, we’re probably on the road, listening to songs about trucks and wondering when it’s time to stop at McDonald’s – but John and Grayson will be holding down the fort without me. See you in September!

< + > Weekly Roundup – August 22, 2026

Welcome to our Healthcare IT Today Weekly Roundup. Each week, we’ll be providing a look back at the articles we posted and why they’re important to the healthcare IT community. We hope this gives you a chance to catch up on anything you may have missed during the week.

Epic UGM 2026: Judy Faulkner Keynote and Cool Stuff Ahead. John Lynn made the trip to Wisconsin, where the vendor’s user group meeting was chock full of announcements. Among the biggest: Cosmos Curiosity (using research data to predict patient outcomes), Ergo (a new clinician interface), Penny (autonomous coding), Data Tracker (within Epic Research), and more initiatives for smaller organizations. Read more…

Epic UGM 2026: Key Stats. John also provided a roundup of numbers that capture the extent of Epic utilization, from 9.3 billion patient records exchanged in the last 12 months to 1.4 million clinicians using AI in Epic every month. Read more…

Ensure Back Office Accuracy and Consistency With Data Governance and Master Data Management. To make this happen, the Healthcare IT Today community recommended structured accountability, standardized data capture, and clearly defined business rules. Read more…

Faster, Safer Patient Care Starts With Better Team Chat. John connected with Jackie Frey at Zenzap, who laid out the major features a good health care messaging tool should provide beyond the table stakes of EHR integration and usability. Read more…

Stop Waiting for Interoperability: Use Agentic AI to Automate Operations Across Systems. Colin Hung caught up with Rishi Nayyar at PocketHealth, which is applying agentic AI to navigate software screens and bypass traditional integration hurdles entirely. Read more…

Life Sciences Today Podcast: AI Transformation in Drug Discovery. Tara Austraat-Churik at Blue Matter Consulting chatted with Danny Lieberman about what happens when AI-native tech companies discover drugs without being pharma companies at all. Read more…

Healthcare IT Today Podcast: Healthcare AI Pet Peeves. What gets John and Colin worked up about AI policy and how AI is used? What about the AI startup landscape? Listen to find out. Read more…

The Clinical Revenue Cycle vs. the Middle Revenue Cycle. Kevin Coloton at HURC unpacked why separating RCM stages has created silos that no longer work in today’s payer environment, along with the role of tech-enabled services in fixing the problem. Read more…

A Build vs. Buy Framework for Agentic AI in Healthcare Operations. The gap between pilot and deployment is where most organizations struggle with AI, noted Chandresh Patel at Bacancy Technology. The challenge is assuming that if an AI agent can complete a workflow, it’s ready for production. Read more…

Americans Are Asking AI for Medical Help, But Bad Data Is Standing in the Way. Matthew Blosl at DexCare noted that with the right data, AI can match patients to the right doctor, surface the right history, and handle admin work – not just answer after-hours questions. Read more…

Patient Financing Belongs in the Digital Front Door, Not Just the Billing Office. The digital front door was built for scheduling, not paying, according to Drew Allen at Conceptualized. Embedding financing lets patients see estimates of costs when they book appointments. Read more…

What Ethically Built AI Means in Behavioral Health. Dr. Michael Arevalo at Core Solutions described why AI can surface a pattern, flag a risk indicator, or draft a summary but cannot make the final call when supporting clinicians in behavioral health. Read more…

This Week’s Health IT Jobs for August 19, 2026: Multiple roles in community health as well as data and information management. Read more…

Bonus Features for August 16, 2026: Only 7% of orgs have dedicated software to manage prior authorizations; Gemini users can now book appointments with Zocdoc. Read more…

Funding and M&A Activity:

• Longevity health platform Function closed $450 million in growth financing.
• Virtual care management company HealthSnap secured $25 million in growth financing.
• Cardiopulmonary care company Wellinks secured $10 million in Series B funding.
• AI app-building platform Blaze.tech raised $8.5 million in pre-seed funding.
• Kyndryl acquired Healthcare IT Leaders, an enterprise IT services provider for hospitals and health systems.
• RCM vendor EnableComp acquired Helix Advisory, a revenue recovery firm.
• Unite Us acquired Vircho Health, which makes performance and financial tools for community care networks.
• Healthcare Triangle acquired a 51% equity stake in CosmoInnovations, which provides medtech and consumer health products.

Thanks for reading and be sure to check out our latest Healthcare IT Today Weekly Roundups.

< + > Blue Matter— AI Transformation in Drug Discovery – Life Sciences Today Podcast Episode 75

We’re excited to be back for another episode of the Life Sciences Today Podcast by Healthcare IT Today. My guest today is Tara Austraat-Churik, Partner at Blue Matter Consulting. Her background spans IBM Watson Health, where she led $50M+ enterprise deals during the first AI wave in pharma, EY’s Health Science and Wellness practice, an MSc in Translational Medicine from Edinburgh, and time as an FBI intelligence analyst. She calls it “Compound Expertise” — depth earned across domains that produces a kind of judgment no single career path can replicate.

In this episode, I sit down with Austraat-Churik and dig into how traditional life science companies compete when AI-native tech companies start discovering drugs without being pharma companies at all.

Check out the main topics of discussion for this episode of the Life Sciences Today podcast:

• How did you end up doing consulting like this?
• Tell me about value creation in the work you do. 
• Are you more of a horizontal AI person, or is there a particular therapeutic area that’s a sweet spot for you?
• What is your moat?
• Trust or scale – what do you think is more important and keeps people coming back to you?
• How many people are on your team?
• Is this more of a corporate initiative or more of a local initiative?
• Techbio companies are now moving up the value chain to develop their own molecules and pipelines. What is your take on this? Is it a trend? What are companies doing? How are pharma/biotech companies dealing with this when computational/AI companies start stealing their turf? How does that work?
• What is the biggest anti-pattern in your industry?
• Will we see a vertically integrated techbio company that does everything?

Subscribe to Danny’s newsletter to get strategic patterns for life science leaders building a defensible business.

Be sure to subscribe to the Life Sciences Today Podcast on your favorite podcasting platform:

• Apple Podcasts
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Along with the popular podcasting platforms above, you can Subscribe to Healthcare IT Today on YouTube.  Plus, all of the audio and video versions will be made available to stream on Healthcare IT Today. As a former pharma-tech founder who bootstrapped to exit, I now help TechBio and digital health CEOs grow revenue—by solving the tech, team, and go-to-market problems that stall your progress. If you want a warrior by your side, connect with me on LinkedIn.

If you work in Life Sciences IT, we’d love to hear where you agree and/or disagree with our takes on health IT innovation in life sciences. Feel free to share your thoughts and perspectives in the comments of this post, in the YouTube comments, or privately on our Contact Us page. Let us know what you think of the podcast and if you have any ideas for future episodes.

Thanks so much for listening!

< + > Clinical Revenue Cycle vs. Middle Revenue Cycle

The following is a guest article by Kevin Coloton, CEO at HURC

If you’ve spent any time in hospital finance or operations, you’ve heard two terms used, sometimes interchangeably, sometimes like they’re rivals: clinical revenue cycle and middle revenue cycle. Entire org charts, budgets, and vendor categories have been built around the distinction between the two.

The truth is they are defined differently, simply for organizational convenience— not because they represent different work. In practice, they represent the same billion-dollar battleground, the area where revenue is either protected or lost.

Why These Terms Exist at All

Traditionally, revenue cycle has been divided into three parts:

• Front-End: registration, eligibility, authorizations
• Middle (or Clinical): documentation, utilization review, coding, charge capture, payer communication
• Back-End: billing, collections, denial follow-up, cash posting

The term clinical revenue cycle emerged to emphasize that much of the middle-cycle work is rooted in clinical decision-making—medical necessity, documentation quality, length of stay, and treatment pathways. The term middle revenue cycle came from finance and operations, meant to define the phase between intake and billing. Both terms describe the point where clinical reality must be translated into something payers will actually reimburse. In practice, this is also where organizations either protect margin or lose it, depending on how effectively clinical, operational, and financial teams coordinate their workflows.

Where Revenue is Truly Won or Lost

Hospitals can have flawless registration and aggressive collections, but if the middle cycle breaks down, the full value is not achieved. This is the point where documentation gaps turn into denials, where utilization decisions extend length of stay, and where unclear payer communication creates delays, write-offs, and appeals that never should have existed.

As noted above, the middle—or clinical—revenue cycle spans:

• Utilization review and denials management
• Clinical documentation improvement (CDI)
• Medical coding
• Ongoing payer communication during care

Failures here don’t always show up immediately, but surface weeks later as denials, underpayments, or unexplained revenue leakage. By then, the clinical moment has passed, and the leverage is gone.

According to recent data from the American Hospital Association Cost of Caring Report, in 2025, hospitals spent nearly $18 billion on overturning claims denials alone. The AHA also estimates that hospitals spent a staggering $43 billion in 2025, trying to collect payments insurers owe for care already delivered. In addition, it found that the average hospital employed about 64 administrative and billing staff dedicated to these functions — roughly 6.5% of total hospital employment.

That’s why CFOs feel the pain here so acutely, and why clinicians often feel caught in the middle, asked to fix revenue problems after the fact.

The False Divide Between Clinical and Financial

Calling it clinical revenue cycle was meant to elevate the role of clinicians, and calling it middle revenue cycle was meant to structure operations. But separating the two conceptually has created silos that no longer work in today’s payer environment.

Payers don’t care how hospitals label the function. They only care whether medical necessity is clearly documented, whether utilization aligns with policy, and whether claims are defensible the first time. That’s why the most effective models don’t treat this as a handoff between departments, but as a single, continuous workflow—one that operates in real time during the course of care.

Tech-Enabled Services are Changing the Equation

Hospitals have tried partial fixes: more software, more staff, or full outsourcing. Each helps, but none fully solves the problem alone. What’s changing now is the rise of integrated, tech-enabled service models that combine technology with experienced operators and embed directly into existing hospital workflows.

Instead of forcing hospitals to choose between tools or talent, these models facilitate the entire utilization review and payer communication function. They adapt to how hospitals already work, reduce onboarding time, and relieve internal teams from constant policy translation and appeal churn.

This approach can help bring about dramatic reductions in clinical denials, shorter lengths of stay, faster post-acute placement, and meaningful net revenue gains, all without reducing staff. In fact, many hospitals are reallocating internal teams back to patient-facing roles where they add the most value.

Whether you call it clinical revenue cycle or middle revenue cycle, the goal is the same: Make sure the care delivered is accurately documented, appropriately coded, medically necessary, and defensible to payers before the claim is submitted.

< + > Kyndryl Announces Agreement to Purchase Healthcare IT Leaders, LLC | EnableComp Acquires Helix Advisory

Check out today’s featured companies who have recently completed an M&A deal, and be sure to check out the full list of past healthcare IT M&A.

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Kyndryl Announces Agreement to Purchase Healthcare IT Leaders, LLC, to Accelerate AI-Led Modernization

Planned Acquisition to Strengthen Kyndryl’s Ability to Serve U.S. Healthcare Organizations Across Applications, Infrastructure, and AI

Kyndryl, a leading provider of mission‑critical enterprise technology services, today announced its intent to acquire Healthcare IT Leaders, LLC, an enterprise IT services provider for hospitals and health systems. The acquisition will enable Kyndryl to more effectively address growing customer demand for its AI‑led business modernization across healthcare providers and payors by leveraging Healthcare IT Leaders’ healthcare consulting and application managed services expertise.

“Healthcare organizations are under increasing pressure to advance complex clinical, operational and workforce systems while maintaining resiliency, security and compliance,” said Jamie Rutledge, President of Kyndryl U.S. “By combining Healthcare IT Leaders’ healthcare consulting expertise with Kyndryl’s AI-led modernization capabilities, we will be better positioned to support providers and payors.”

Following the close of the acquisition, Kyndryl will combine Healthcare IT Leaders’ consulting expertise in applications across clinical, operational, and workforce platforms with Kyndryl’s infrastructure leadership and AI capabilities to enable healthcare organizations to work with a single provider across applications, platforms, and underlying IT environments.

Kyndryl already supports a broad set of healthcare organizations by running large-scale, highly regulated IT environments across the U.S. The addition of Healthcare IT Leaders’ business will deepen Kyndryl’s relationships with leading national healthcare systems and expand Kyndryl’s access to the application and consulting layer of those environments. Together, the two companies will…

Full release here, originally announced August 10th, 2026.

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EnableComp Acquires Helix Advisory, Advancing Zero Balance Review Technology in Its Complex Revenue Recovery Platform

Hospitals No Longer Leave Money on the Table Because a Claim is Too Small, Too Complex

EnableComp, the leading provider of technology-driven complex revenue cycle management (RCM) solutions, today announced its acquisition of Helix Advisory, a Cincinnati-based revenue recovery firm whose technology identifies underpayments that traditional rules-based audit systems are structurally unable to catch.

The investment expands EnableComp’s Zero Balance Review capabilities as part of its broader platform roadmap. The acquisition strengthens EnableComp’s platform with three specific capabilities:

• the ability to identify underpayments that standard audit logic cannot see
• clinical signal detection that flags discrepancies between how a case was coded and what a payer actually reimbursed
• root-cause analytics that trace why an underpayment occurred, so clients can prevent future losses, not just recover past ones

For EnableComp’s hospital clients, the integration means underpayment recovery that previously required a standalone audit vendor — or that didn’t happen at all because the claim fell below a manual review threshold — now runs natively inside the same platform handling their complex claims and denials.

“Most recovery programs are built to find what they’re told to look for. Helix’s technology finds what nobody told it to look for — that’s the difference between a rules engine and real intelligence,” said Frank Forte, CEO at EnableComp…

Full release here, originally announced August 12th, 2026.

< + > Great Stats from Epic UGM

In case you missed it, we shared our roundup of announcements from Epic UGM.  One of the other parts I love at Epic UGM is all of the stats they share about the impact that Epic and their users are having on healthcare.  Below you’ll find our compilation of the various stats that were shared at the event:

• Epic customers train over 90% of medical students
• 17 countries in the Epic community; Germany is the newest as Charité joins
• 1.4 million clinicians assisted by AI in Epic each month
• Monthly gen AI activity in July 2025 was 50 million and is now 2 billion as of July 2026
• Art clinician and nurse summaries are in use at more than 300 health systems
• Chart with Art is live in more than 70 unique specialties and multiple clinical roles
• Chart with Art for nursing is live at 11 health systems
• More than 1/3 of Emmie conversations happen after-hours
• Professional Billing Coding Assistant reduced coding-related denials by 33% across 160 organizations
• In Basket Art reduced time spent reviewing patient messages by 50% (Texas Children’s)
• Ask Emmie – 1,000+ hours saved for call center staff over 10 months (Ochsner Health) and 73% fewer billing-related In Basket messages (Community Health Network)
• Dynamic Scheduling Templates saw a 16% increase in online availability (OhioHealth)
• Patient Flow saw a 15% increase in bed days using AI Transfer Assistant (Loma Linda University Health)
• MyChart Central has 346 organizations live in 50 states and available to 115 million patients
• SlicerDicer SideKick reduced time spent creating queries by up to 85% (RWJBarnabas Health)
• Epic Staff did 31,126 R&D Immersion Days in 19 countries since last UGM
• Epic used to release new versions every 18 months, now they do so every 3 months
• A single quarterly Epic release now carries roughly the enhancement volume of an old 18-month
  release. The latest release contained 27% more code than the same version a year ago

In the last year…

• When ordering or administering a medication, clinicians changed course 224 million times based on an advisory from Epic
• 127,000 gallons of blood were saved in the last year by using automatic order adjustments in Epic to combine draws and avoid unnecessary sticks for patients
• 413,000 lung nodules were identified in radiology reports using AI for discrete follow-up tracking helping 2,050 patient start treatment for lung cancer earlier
• Dentists changed medications 278,000 times based on warnings shown in Epic
• Patients were seen an average of 30 days sooner with Fast Pass in MyChart
• Patients saved $300 million on medications when providers switched to lower-cost alternatives thanks to alerts in Epic
• 9.3 billion patient records exchanged across 50 states and 10 countries – 50% between Epic & non-Epic – 90% of Epic organizations are live or installing TEFCA
• 21,000 duplicate imaging tests were prevented thanks to images exchanges across health systems

Implementation and Technical Service Stats

• 300k new users live
• 35 full go-lives
• 460 Add-ons
• 35k Gold star featured turned on resulting in 2000 more Gold Stars
• 1,500 upgrade complete

Cosmos and Cosmos-enabled insights:

• 320 million unique patients, 23 billion encounters, 99 billion lab results, 186 million surgeries, 170 million home care visits, 25 million cancer cases, 18 million rare disease patients, 15 million mom-baby links in Cosmos.
• More than 220 papers published (10 journals) based on research from Cosmos
• Look-Alikes used more than 25,000 times last year.
• Best Care Choices for My Patient live at more than 60 organizations.
• 20 customers are early adopters of Cosmos Curiosity.
• 56 organizations live with Best Care Choices for My Patient
• 1 million monthly admissions use Cosmos Median Length of Stay

Those were most of the stats shared at Epic’s 2026 UGM.  Which stats stood out to you?

< + > The Role of Data Governance and Master Data Management in Ensuring Accuracy and Consistency Across Back Office Systems

Data is a major part of everything we do in healthcare; back-office health IT systems are no exception to this. There is a tremendous amount of data that is needed to successfully run all claims processing, medical billing, patient scheduling, etc. Gathering data isn’t usually the issue; however, governing and managing it is. For example, it’s not very hard to create a bill for rendered services, but what is hard is tracking what was paid in full, what is on payment plans, what charges are in dispute, and making sure that information is only accessible to the relevant parties.

To get a better picture of the importance of data management in back office health IT systems, we reached out to our wonderful Healthcare IT Today Community to ask — what role do data governance and master data management play in ensuring accuracy and consistency across back office health IT systems? Below are their responses.

Ashley Murgatroyd, Director of Healthcare Strategy at LexisNexis Risk Solutions
Data governance and master data management are critical to back-office health IT systems because they create a single, consistent foundation for patient data across fragmented administrative workflows. By resolving identities and eliminating duplicate records, organizations can improve data accuracy, streamline claims processing, and reduce costly errors tied to misidentification. These capabilities help maintain a cohesive, longitudinal view of patient records as they move through billing, eligibility, and other back-office functions, which can improve operational efficiency and support more reliable outcomes.

Ultimately, strong governance and master data management practices enable health systems to reduce financial leakage, protect sensitive data, and ensure consistency across the systems that power day-to-day administrative operations.

Denis Whelan, CEO at Documo
They’re critical. Automation is only as good as the data governance frameworks backing it up. Data governance and master data management are foundational business drivers. When you invest in clean, governed master data, you create the trust required to fully embrace automation—allowing you to scale your back office, wipe out administrative burnout, and protect the financial and operational health of your organization.

Even the most advanced AI and Machine Learning models encounter ambiguity—like a smudged, handwritten fax or a poorly scanned invoice. Data Governance dictates the exact protocol for what happens when data drops below a specific confidence threshold.

Instead of letting a system guess and corrupt the database, a strong governance framework should route that specific file to a human-in-the-loop workflow. A team member verifies or corrects the record, and that human intervention is used to train the model to be more accurate next time. This ensures that the master database remains untainted while maintaining high operational velocity.

John Squeo, Senior Vice President at CitiusTech
Without a trusted, enterprise-wide master record for entities like patients, providers, vendors, and cost centers, back-office analytics produce conflicting outputs that erode executive confidence and slow decision-making. Data governance and MDM platforms, including Microsoft Purview, Databricks Unity Catalog, Snowflake Horizon, Informatica, Reltio, and Profisee, are increasingly essential for maintaining a single source of governance across fragmented Health IT landscapes. Strong data governance frameworks establish accountability structures, including data stewards, ownership policies, and quality SLAs that sustain accuracy beyond the initial implementation.

In value-based care environments especially, flawed provider or payer master data directly translates into misdirected payments and compliance risk. Data governance is particularly critical when modernizing with AI to establish data provenance, traceability, and governance of metadata collation that drives user trust in generated insights and reliability in automated processes. Forward-looking organizations are now treating data governance and MDM as foundational infrastructure for AI readiness, recognizing that model quality is only as good as the data underneath it.

Kevin Erdal, President, Advisory Services at Nordic
Healthcare organizations generate massive amounts of operational, financial, workforce, and supply chain data, but without strong governance structures, they often struggle with duplicate records, inconsistent definitions, and fragmented reporting.

Master data management establishes a single source of truth for critical enterprise data, including vendors, suppliers, employees, locations, the chart of accounts, and operational metrics. This improves consistency across systems and enables more accurate reporting, forecasting, and analytics.

Strong data governance also helps organizations build trust in their data. When finance, HR, supply chain, and clinical teams are aligned around standardized definitions and ownership models, leaders can make decisions with greater confidence.

This becomes even more important as organizations invest in AI and advanced analytics. AI tools are only as effective as the quality and consistency of the underlying data. Organizations that prioritize governance and data integrity are better positioned to scale automation, improve interoperability, and generate meaningful operational insights.

Monte Sandler, Chief Operating Officer at WebPT
Data quality is foundational in healthcare. If patient or payer information is inaccurate at the front end, those issues create denials and delays later in the revenue cycle. Strong data governance helps organizations standardize how information is captured and updated, while also making it easier to identify patterns and root causes across workflows. Reliable data is what makes proactive, “shift left” strategies possible.

Rachel Blum, VP, Emerging Markets and Partners at Verato
Highly accurate MDM is essential and absolutely critical to ensure data accuracy and consistency across not just back office systems, but all Health IT systems. The downstream impact of poorly executed MDM is flawed reporting, compliance risk, and operational inefficiencies that can ripple across the organization. At its worst, mismanaged data erodes trust in the system entirely, forcing teams to rely on manual workarounds instead of the technology meant to support them. Trying to scale to support AI? Better get MDM right, or AI will quickly expose these flaws in your data infrastructure.

Sherri Atchley, AVP for Altera Managed Services at Altera Digital Health
Data governance and master data management play critical roles in ensuring accurate patient matching, workflow integrity, financial reconciliation, and operational consistency across integrated health IT systems. Without strong governance practices, organizations face increased risks of duplicate patient records, incorrect patient associations, payment posting discrepancies, delayed processing, and downstream operational errors.

As automation expands into back office workflows, such as inbound fax filing or remittance/payment posting, maintaining strong governance standards and audit controls becomes increasingly important to ensure accurate document routing, indexing, reconciliation, and financial integrity.

While robotic process automation (RPA) can help enforce process consistency and reduce manual errors, organizations still require strong governance frameworks, clearly defined business rules and ongoing monitoring to maintain high-quality operational and financial data across integrated applications.

Dr. Scott Schell, Chief Medical Officer at Cognizant
Data governance is now operationally essential. Organizations cannot scale analytics, automation, or AI with inconsistent enterprise data. Master data management creates consistency around identities, locations, workforce structures, and financial attribution. Governance establishes accountability for maintaining that consistency over time.

So many great ideas here! Huge thank you to everyone who took the time out of their day to submit a quote to us! And thank you to all of you for taking the time out of your day to read this article! We could not do this without all of your support.

What role do you think data governance and master data management play in ensuring accuracy and consistency across back office health IT systems? Let us know over on social media, we’d love to hear from all of you!