OasisLMS

Practical revenue cycle strategies for stronger collections, clearer financial policies, and better patient conversations.

High deductibles, harder patient payment conversations, and gaps in financial controls can put pressure on both your team and your practice as a whole. Susan Childs brings more than 30 years of healthcare experience to a series built around the revenue cycle challenges musculoskeletal leaders are working through now.

Expect tools and insights you can take back to your team, from building patient-friendly Accounts Receivable policies to using emotional intelligence in collections conversations and protecting practice finances.

Make Your Revenue Cycle Easier to Manage and Easier to Explain
Revenue cycle problems rarely stay inside the billing office. They show up at the front desk, in patient conversations, in provider workflows, and in the numbers leadership watches every month.

This series connects financial policy with the people responsible for carrying it out. Susan will cover practical approaches to accounts receivable, patient collections, payment protocols, internal controls, and the communication skills that help policies work in real life.

This series is made possible with the support of Athelas

The founder of Evolution Healthcare Consulting, Susan Fink Childs has over 30 years of experience in healthcare, serves as a medical practice advisor for a diverse array of physicians and medical systems. Susan serves as coach, educator, workshops and training in communications nationwide. 

Her trusted and proven approaches help practices establish conscious processes that actively promote self-awareness, creating high performance symbiotic teams. As an orator, thought leader, and communications specialist, Ms. Childs is a national speaker and international author on emotional intelligence and leadership, communication, collaboration, operations, and conflict resolution. Her established professionalism relates to leadership and Emotional Quotient. 

• Build AR and payment policies around today’s patient financial responsibility.
• Clarify who communicates financial expectations, when the conversation happens, and how providers fit in.
• Identify control weaknesses and daily checks that can help protect practice finances.

Patient collections can turn tense fast. This session puts emotional intelligence at the center of financial communication so teams can handle difficult conversations with more awareness while still protecting the practice’s financial performance.

• Apply emotional intelligence and relationship management to patient payment conversations.
• Work through prompt pay, discounts, disclosure, and payer expectations with clearer communication.
• Build a team-based collections approach that supports patients and predictable revenue.

The administrative burden on orthopedic practices has reached a breaking point in 2026, driven by major CPT code updates, new federal mandates for prior authorization turnarounds, and relentless payer scrutiny. For lean-operating practices, these headwinds represent more than routine compliance challenges—they directly jeopardize revenue stability and extend accounts receivable timelines.

During this presentation, Athelas will examine key shifts in the 2026 orthopedic reimbursement landscape and identify where practices face the greatest risk of payment delays and claim denials. The discussion will highlight how top-performing medical groups leverage AI-driven automation to transform these industry hurdles into a strategic advantage, consistently achieving first-pass clean claim rates above 95%. Participants will gain an actionable framework to evaluate their revenue cycle operations under current 2026 regulations, alongside a clear plan for targeted automation that yields high ROI.

• Recognize the leading causes of orthopedic claim denials in 2026 (documentation specificity, site-of-service payment shifts, payer algorithm scrutiny) and where they most commonly originate in the revenue cycle.
• Assess how AI and automation can effectively decrease administrative work and denial rates, while pinpointing key areas where human expertise must remain central.
• Build a practical checklist for auditing their own practice's revenue cycle against 2026's regulatory and payer landscape.