Who’s Holding the Blueprint? Three Takeaways from HFMA Region 6
Every year, HFMA Region 6 sends a strong signal on where healthcare finance is heading. This year’s theme, Blueprints of Hope, was fitting: so much of the conference came back to one question.
Who is actually accountable when technology, vendors, and process all touch the same revenue cycle problem?
Here are three highlights from Region 6 that help answer it:
Technology Is Only as Strong as the Foundation Beneath It
HFMA National Chair Matt Cox, CFO of Corewell Health, built his keynote around three themes: Foundation, Partnership, and Trust. One message in particular resonated: “Technology is a tool. Strategy and culture are the blueprint. Using AI in a broken process just makes a broken process faster.”
That’s the exact failure mode behind vendor sprawl and overengineered tech: organizations routinely layer automation onto a vendor relationship that was never structured with clear KPIs, escalation paths, or accountability in the first place, then wonder why the new tool didn’t move the needle.
Through a Vendor Management Office (VMO) lens:
"Foundation" isn't just an internal capability question — it's whether your vendor contracts, SLAs, and governance structure can actually support acceleration. A vendor with no defined performance baseline can't be "sped up" responsibly.
Cox's "Partnership" pillar — coming to the table curious, prepared, and ready to share responsibility — is the working definition of what a mature VMO does between your organization and its vendors, not just between departments.
His challenge to leaders (pick one foundation to strengthen, one partnership to deepen, one trust practice to build) translates directly into a VMO exercise: audit your vendor portfolio, pick the relationship with the weakest performance visibility, and fix the measurement before adding more automation to it.
AI Accountability Is a Governance Problem
One of the most valuable discussions at the conference came from revenue cycle executives at ProMedica, Henry Ford Health, and Summa Health, talking candidly about AI adoption and accountability. A particularly important theme emerged: the output is the output, regardless of whether it was produced by a person, an algorithm, or a combination of the two.
That sounds simple, but it has significant implications for revenue cycle leaders:
Operations owns the output, full stop — regardless of whether a human or a vendor’s algorithm produced it.
AI oversight was described as a “sticky wicket” — you can’t set it and forget it. Coding output has to be continuously audited, and vendors need to be stress-tested for hallucination and drift, not just onboarded once and trusted.
Mid-RCM — coding, claims automation, and similar functions — is where AI vendors are earning trust fastest. It’s also where a lapse in oversight is most consequential to revenue integrity, making it the single highest-leverage gap to close.
Through a Vendor Management Office (VMO) lens:
This is precisely the governance gap a VMO closes: someone has to own ongoing vendor performance auditing — not just initial vendor selection and implementation.
The panel's "EHR-first, vendor as bridge" philosophy — Summa's "plug in and plug out" model, reviewing the vendor landscape every 12–18 months — is a textbook Vendor Management Office cadence.
Evaluation criteria — confidence the vendor will outperform, and realistic time-to-ramp — are exactly what a Vendor Management Office should be scoring and revisiting, not assuming static from the RFP stage forward.
The Revenue Cycle Executive Experience (RCEE) Roundtable: Turning Industry Challenges Into Action
I had the chance to facilitate the Revenue Cycle Executive Experience (RCEE) Roundtable, which pulled leaders into a working discussion across four themes: Tools & Technology, Patient Financial Experience, Payer Relations, and Compliance & Regulatory Impacts.
Two prompts from the session are worth pulling out directly, because they cut straight to vendor and process accountability:
What happens to the work (and headcount) AI replaces?
AI may create efficiencies, but realizing those efficiencies requires an organizational plan for the people, processes, and responsibilities surrounding the technology.
Are your processes keeping pace with changing coverage requirements?
Under OBBBA, Medicaid reverification is happening more frequently, and administrative — not eligibility — lapses are driving coverage loss. That’s a process and technology gap that sits squarely at the intersection of your eligibility vendor, your EHR workflow, and your financial counseling team.
When multiple systems and teams are involved, someone needs to own the process end to end.
Through a Vendor Management Office (VMO) lens:
With significant changes unfolding over a multiyear horizon, what are healthcare organizations doing now to prepare? From a vendor management perspective, that's a vendor-readiness audit: do your eligibility, prior-auth, and coverage-verification vendors have a roadmap for these changes, or are they waiting for you to ask?
Every organization has experienced a technology investment that didn't produce the expected results. The important question isn't simply why it didn't work — it's what did we learn, who owned the outcome, and what will we do differently next time?
HFMA Region 6 delivered, and so did Grand Rapids — a wonderful city full of smart, dedicated healthcare executives. Technology and vendor management will always be challenging, but the throughline across all three sessions was the same: accountability has to be built into the structure before the technology gets layered on top of it.