Macedon Technologies at the 2025 HFMA Western Symposium – Key Takeaways and Industry Insights

The Healthcare Financial Management Association (HFMA) Western Symposium, held from January 19-22, 2025, brought together healthcare financial professionals, industry leaders, and technology innovators to discuss critical challenges, trends, and opportunities shaping the healthcare financial landscape. 

I attended to learn more about the evolving needs of healthcare providers and explore how workflow automation and AI-driven solutions can help address pressing issues in revenue cycle management (RCM), payor negotiations, and financial operations.

The sessions were incredibly insightful deep dives into the troubles of revenue cycles for healthcare providers, with Think Tank Discussions, CFO panels, and more.  Across these, two dominant pain points emerged:

Payor Contracting & Denials Management: Providers face persistent challenges with high claim denials, complex payor negotiations, and administrative overhead.  This leads to email overload, lack of standard processes, and poor contract enforcement.

Financial Pressures & Grants Management: With ongoing financial strain, hospitals seek alternative funding sources like infrastructure grants. Manually securing grants for projects like California’s seismic retrofitting requirements is both time-consuming and fraught with errors.

Intelligent Automation is a good fit for solving both of these issues, though with slightly different types of automation solutions:

1. Payor Contracting: Managing payor contracts is an operationally intensive process requiring better data visibility and strategic automation.  AI-driven appeal processes and workflow automation are crucial for efficiency.  

AI-driven automation is only part of the solution, however.  I recommend to:

• Build cross-functional payor teams consisting of RCM, legal, and finance allows for more strategic negotiations
• Leverage real-time payor scorecards & tracking of performance benchmarks enforces contracts to ensure compliance with agreed-upon rates and reduce underpayments
• Track administrative overhead and email traffic related to payor negotiations
• Automate document extraction and contract analysis to highlight key terms and rate changes

2. Grants Management: For Grants Management, automating through a centralized, standardized workflow streamlines applications, tracking, and compliance. For example, a standardized workflow can:

• Track and manage grant applications for seismic retrofitting, facility expansions, and compliance projects
• Automate document submission and compliance monitoring to ensure adherence to funding requirements
• Provide visibility into available funding sources and deadlines for strategic financial planning

In both of these pain points, the HFMA Western Symposium reaffirmed the need for tailored, workflow-driven automation solutions to help healthcare providers navigate financial complexity. 

Want to explore how Macedon’s workflow automation can transform your healthcare operations? Let's talk.

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Macedon Technologies leverages AI and low-code automation through powerful business process tools to tackle industry challenges and drive operational efficiency.