The Work No One Sees Is Draining Rural Hospitals

In Chief Healthcare Executive, MedEvolve CEO Matt Seefeld explains why administrative complexity is becoming a financial risk for rural providers.

Rural hospitals across the United States are facing mounting financial pressure. Public conversations about these challenges often focus on reimbursement levels, workforce shortages, and policy changes. While those issues are real, another pressure is quietly building inside hospital operations.

Administrative work that generates no revenue is consuming time, staff capacity, and financial resources.

When claims require repeated intervention before they are paid, the operational cost multiplies. Staff must correct errors, respond to payer requests, and resubmit claims. Each step adds more work, delays payment, and diverts limited resources away from higher-value activities.

For rural hospitals with smaller administrative teams, the impact can be especially significant. Every additional claim touch represents time that staff cannot spend on other essential responsibilities. Over time, that hidden workload can compound into a meaningful financial strain.

In a new article published in Chief Healthcare Executive, MedEvolve CEO Matt Seefeld explores how administrative complexity is contributing to financial pressure for rural hospitals and why healthcare leaders need better ways to measure operational effort.

The article examines:

  • Why administrative complexity is increasing inside healthcare financial operations

  • How repeated claim touches create hidden operational costs

  • Why measuring operational workload is becoming essential for improving performance

As rural hospitals work to maintain financial stability and protect access to care in their communities, understanding the operational drivers behind administrative work will be critical.

About Matt Seefeld

Matt Seefeld, Chief Executive Officer at MedEvolve, brings over 24 years of management consulting experience in the healthcare industry. He has extensive expertise in the assessment, design and implementation of process improvement programs and technology development across the entire revenue cycle. Matt began his career with Stockamp & Associates, Inc. and worked for both PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP and Deloitte Consulting LLP in their healthcare and life sciences practice lines. In 2007, he developed a business intelligence solution and founded Interpoint Partners, LLC, where he served as Chairman and Chief Executive Officer. In 2011, he sold his business to Streamline Health Solutions where he then served as Chief Strategist of Revenue Cycle followed by Senior Vice President of Solutions Strategy until 2014. Matt ran global sales for NantHealth and provided consulting services for healthcare technology and service businesses nationwide, prior to joining MedEvolve full-time.

Read more articles from Matt >>

Effective Intelligence® Benchmarks in Action

Hospitals and medical groups are hemorrhaging margin through inefficiency, outdated benchmarks, and tech that promises AI magic but delivers admin bloat. In this expert-led session, you’ll learn how to uncover where your staff is wasting time (and money), implement performance benchmarks that actually matter, and use AI and analytics to drive results — not just dashboards.

Don’t make high-stakes decisions for your healthcare organization with incomplete or misleading data. Traditional metrics barely scratch the surface. Using Effective Intelligence®, you can generate and track new revenue cycle benchmarks that focus on understanding where in the process avoidable touches are happening and effectiveness of staff. The ability to measure against these new benchmarks is key for a sustainable business today.

Effective Intelligence: Our comprehensive RCM automation solution

Effective Intelligence combines Patient Financial Clearance Automation, Medical Billing Workflow Automation, and Real-Time RCM Analytics in a cloud-based platform designed to integration with your current EMR/PM technology to measure the effectiveness of your RCM staff.

Review and assess your practice’s financial status in 5 min or less and know exact where you are losing money and why. Measure the work effort of every revenue cycle employee, incentivize and retain your top performers, and help employees that need improvement.

You can prevent most common denials, rejections and write-offs during the scheduling and pre-registration process in advance of the appointment. Configure checkpoints and use central task management to quickly clear patients and keep your front office staffing needs at a minimum.

As team members log in to the web-based application and record each “touch” of a claim,  outcome, and next task, key data points are recorded like who completed the task and when, outcome, task notes, internal / external messages sent, collection success and other data points that feed into our real-time analytics.

Reduce RCM labor dependence with financial clearance, insurance A/R, & patient A/R automation modules with real-time analytics.

Increase productivity and simplify front & back office processes while keeping your staff focused with our flagship PM system.

Recent Posts