Most healthcare organizations don’t struggle because of patient care. They struggle because of what happens behind the scenes. Administrative work keeps piling up, billing rules keep shifting, and teams are spending more time managing processes than moving revenue forward.
This isn’t just an inconvenience anymore. According to recent data, 86% of healthcare practices say administrative burden is a major barrier to patient care. For independent practices, that pressure often shows up as delayed payments, missed revenue, and billing teams stretched well beyond capacity. As operating costs continue to rise and reimbursement becomes harder to manage, many organizations are realizing that simply pushing teams to work harder isn’t sustainable. The conversation is shifting toward how work gets done, not just how much of it gets done—and RCM automation is becoming part of that shift.
From our experience working closely with healthcare providers across the U.S., this change usually starts when organizations notice how small inefficiencies, repeated day after day, quietly turn into significant revenue loss. Automation isn’t about replacing billing teams. It’s about removing unnecessary friction so experienced staff can focus on work that actually improves the revenue cycle.
A Staffing Problem Caused by Repetitive Work
For most practice administrators, the issue isn’t only hiring or retaining staff. It’s how much of their team’s time is tied up in repetitive, manual tasks.
The data paints a clear picture. Nearly two-thirds of billing staff—67%—spend more than a quarter of their workday on repetitive administrative work. Time that could be used for denial analysis, payer follow-ups, or recovering lost revenue is instead spent on tasks that haven’t meaningfully changed in years.
Insurance verification and pre-authorizations are a common example. Across practices, these activities alone can consume up to 10 hours per week. Documentation adds another layer of strain, with 41% of providers spending more than a quarter of their day on documentation. Patient intake further slows things down, often taking up to 20 minutes per patient when done manually, even though automation can reduce that time to around five minutes.
When this much effort goes into low-value work, productivity suffers. Not because billing teams aren’t capable, but because the systems they’re using were never designed to support efficiency at scale.
In many practices, these issues don’t feel urgent because work still gets done. Claims go out, follow-ups happen, and payments come in. But without automation, teams end up spending most of their time correcting preventable issues instead of addressing what causes denials, delays, and rework in the first place.
From Task-Doers to System Overseers
At Talisman Solutions, we’ve seen a clear difference between practices that struggle and those that run more smoothly. The strongest organizations don’t ask staff to manually handle every step of the billing process. Instead, they put systems in place to manage routine work and free their teams to focus on oversight, judgment, and exceptions.
The impact shows up quickly. Practices that use automation effectively spend around 2 hours per week on administrative tasks. Most practices spend 10 hours or more, and some report spending as much as 28 hours per week on administrative work alone.
With Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and AI in place, manual data entry can be reduced by up to 87%. Routine, rules-based tasks are handled automatically, allowing billing teams to monitor workflows and step in only when review or escalation is needed.
At Talisman, this system-oversight approach shapes how we design and support revenue cycle workflows. Routine work runs quietly in the background, while experienced billing professionals focus on payer behavior, exceptions, and performance trends that require context and judgment.
The Talisman Solutions Approach to Full RCM
Automation on its own isn’t enough. At Talisman, we manage the entire revenue cycle for providers and healthcare organizations, using technology where it adds value and relying on experienced people to guide every stage of the billing process.
Our RCM model reflects how healthcare billing actually works today. Payers move quickly, rules change often, and manual processes struggle to keep pace. By combining automation, AI-driven checks, and experienced review, we help providers operate revenue cycles that are easier to manage, more predictable, and scalable without adding strain.
- Medical Billing and Coding: We use AI-assisted workflows to support accurate coding and stay aligned with updates such as the 2025 CPT code changes. Identifying issues earlier in the process can reduce avoidable denials by up to 40%, rather than uncovering them after claims are already delayed.
- AI Scribe and Note Assist: By reducing manual documentation, these tools ease provider workload. Teams using AI documentation tools report 63% less burnout and 49% less time spent on documentation, supporting better patient focus and stronger downstream billing performance.
- Accounts Receivable (A/R) Management: Many practices still have more than 19% of claims sitting in A/R for over 120 days. We use AI insights combined with hands-on expertise to identify delays, prioritize follow-ups, and continuously monitor performance, with the goal of bringing that figure below 10%.
- Revenue Recovery and Claim Quality: Through AI-driven claim scrubbing and underpayment detection, we help practices reach 95% or higher first-pass clean claim rates, compared to the 70–80% commonly seen with manual or offshore billing models.
What ties these services together is visibility. When billing, documentation, A/R, and recovery function as connected workflows, organizations gain a clearer view of where revenue slows down or leaks out. That clarity allows issues to be addressed earlier—before revenue is impacted.
Reclaiming Your Practice’s Potential
The future of revenue cycle management isn’t about adding more staff or asking teams to work longer hours. It’s about building systems that work better.
Automating the repetitive tasks that consume 67% of billing staff time is no longer just an efficiency improvement. It directly affects cash flow, staff capacity, and long-term financial stability. When teams move into a system-oversight model, errors decrease, payments move faster, and staff regain the ability to focus on work that drives real revenue outcomes.
For many organizations, the turning point comes when RCM is treated as a connected system instead of a collection of disconnected tasks. With the right structure in place, automation becomes a support layer rather than a disruption.
The biggest gains don’t come from doing more work. They come from putting better systems in place—and letting experienced teams do what they do best.
