Healthcare Management Transformation

Our Philosophy: What We Stand Against

A partner is defined not by what they promise, but by what they refuse to accept.

For too long, the American healthcare system has forced private practices to accept a set of broken ideas and inefficient processes as “the cost of doing business.” We’ve been told that provider burnout is inevitable, that fighting with insurance companies is just part of the job, and that practices must hire more people to solve problems that shouldn’t exist in the first place.

At PracticePath, we refuse to accept this reality.

We believe that to build a better future, you must first have the courage to declare what is no longer acceptable. To fix a problem, you must first name it. We drew a line in the sand and defined the real enemies of practice profitability and provider well-being.

The following is more than a list; it’s our diagnostic checklist for a broken system and our declaration of independence from it. This is our official opposition list. If you find yourself nodding along, then we’re fighting the same fight.

The Official Opposition List: What We Are Against

Our mission is to liberate practices from the hidden forces that drain their profitability and passion. We are not against your people; we are against the broken systems that hold your people back. We are fundamentally against:

Category 1: Flawed Operational Philosophies

• The “Cost of Doing Business” Fallacy: We are against the belief that massive administrative overhead, high denial rates, and staff burnout are simply the unavoidable costs of running a medical practice. They are not costs; they are symptoms of a failed model.
• The “More Bodies” Solution: We are against the default strategy of hiring more people to solve systemic process problems. Adding more staff to a broken workflow only creates a more expensive and complex version of the same broken workflow.
• “Gut-Feel” Management: We are against making critical business decisions based on anecdote and instinct. In a data-rich environment, relying on gut-feel over evidence is managerial malpractice.
• The “Clinicians vs. Business” Mentality: We are against the idea that clinical excellence and operational excellence are opposing forces. A practice that runs efficiently and profitably is a practice that can better support its providers and provide more sustainable care to its patients.
• Technological Timidity: We are against the fear-based mindset that views new technology as a threat or a burden. We believe the right technology acts as a liberator, not an obstacle.

Category 2: Broken Processes & Workflows

• “Swivel Chair” Integration: We are against the daily reality of staff acting as human APIs—manually copying and pasting information from the EHR to the PM system, from the PM system to a spreadsheet, and from a spreadsheet back into a payer portal. This is the single biggest source of errors, waste, and staff frustration.
• After-the-Fact Documentation: We are against the process of providers treating the patient first and then, hours or days later, trying to perfectly recall and document the session for compliance. This “cognitive tax” degrades note quality and provider well-being.
• Reactive Denial Management: We are against the “whack-a-mole” approach to denials, where staff react to each rejection one by one. This is a rigged game you can’t win. We believe in proactive denial prevention and automated, data-driven appeals.
• Manual Patient Onboarding: We are against paper packets, downloadable PDFs, and patient portals that require staff to manually transcribe patient information. The patient intake process should be a seamless, digital data transfer, not a clerical task.
• Phone Tag as a Business Strategy: We are against relying on the telephone for routine, automatable tasks like appointment reminders, eligibility checks, and claim status follow-ups.

Category 3: Counterproductive Data & Reporting Practices

• The EMR as a Data Prison: We are against EHRs that are great at holding data hostage but terrible at providing actionable intelligence. We oppose the endless sea of unintelligent reporting—static data dumps and canned reports that obscure the truth rather than reveal it.
• Vanity Metrics: We are against focusing only on top-line metrics like “Total Billed” while ignoring the numbers that actually matter: Net Collection Rate, Days in A/R, and Cost Per Claim.
• Retrospective Reporting: We are against managing your practice by looking in the rearview mirror. We oppose relying on unintelligent, retrospective reporting that only shows last month’s data, ensuring you are always one step behind.
• Ignoring Process Inefficiency: We are against “flying blind.” Practices that do not use process mining or data intelligence have no real idea where the friction, waste, and bottlenecks in their operations truly are, leading them to manage by anecdote instead of by accurate reporting.

Category 4: Outdated Tools & Technologies

• Disconnected Systems: We are against using separate, non-integrated systems for EHR and Practice Management, which necessitates the “swivel chair” workflows we oppose.
• Spreadsheets as a Core Tool: We are against using Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets as a primary tool for managing claims, denials, or any critical operational workflow. They are a symptom of a broken process.
• The Isolated AI Scribe: We are against the naive adoption of AI Scribes without a “defensive AI” to protect and enhance the notes they generate. An unprotected scribe is a strategic trap, not a solution.
• The Fax Machine: We are, unequivocally, against the continued existence of the fax machine in modern healthcare.

Category 5: Harmful Cultural Factors

• The Normalization of Burnout: We are against any culture that accepts provider and staff burnout as normal or inevitable. Burnout is a direct result of system failure and a leading indicator of financial distress.
• A Culture of “Firefighting”: We are against work environments where staff spend their days reacting to urgent problems rather than operating within a system designed to prevent those problems from ever occurring.
• Rewarding Busyness Over Effectiveness: We are against rewarding the employee who “works the hardest” (i.e., spends the most hours fighting fires) over the one who contributes to a system that requires less effort to produce better results.

Category 6: Flawed Strategic & Growth Models

• Fee-for-Service Myopia: We are against the exclusive focus on maximizing billable encounters today, while completely failing to build the data and process infrastructure required for the inevitable shift to value-based care tomorrow. This leaves practices strategically vulnerable.
• Confusing “Being Busy” with “Being Profitable”: We oppose running at 110% capacity on low-margin activities that create massive administrative drag, rather than optimizing for high-value care and overall profitability.
• Growth Without Integration: We oppose the strategy of acquiring smaller practices and simply patching them onto the existing organization without a disciplined plan for integrating their technology, processes, and culture. This creates a chaotic, inefficient, and ultimately less valuable enterprise.

Category 7: Broken Patient Journey & Engagement Models

• Blaming the Patient for No-Shows: We are against treating no-shows as a failure of the patient, punishable by a fee, rather than as a failure of the practice’s own outdated scheduling, communication, and reminder systems.
• Opaque Billing: We are against any billing process that results in a patient receiving a “surprise bill” or a statement they cannot easily understand. This practice erodes trust and creates downstream collection problems.
• The Post-Visit Black Hole: We oppose the mentality that a practice’s responsibility ends when the patient walks out the door, with no automated, systematic follow-up to check on patient progress, ensure care plan adherence, or gather feedback.

Category 8: Flawed Technology & Data Ownership Models

• The “All-in-One EMR” Myth: We are against the belief that a single, monolithic EMR system can do everything well. This philosophy leads to practices being held hostage by mediocre software, when the modern, superior approach is a best-in-class, integrated ecosystem.
• Delegating Strategy to IT Support: We oppose entrusting mission-critical technology strategy to an IT person whose primary skill is fixing printers. This results in a tech stack optimized for stability, not for generating the strategic reporting needed for growth.
• Data Ownership Complacency: We are against the failure to scrutinize vendor contracts to ensure the practice, not the vendor, truly owns its own data and can extract it in a usable format at any time.

Category 9: Shortsighted Financial & Valuation Strategies

• Managing for Revenue, Not Enterprise Value: We are against managing the practice to simply maximize today’s revenue, instead of building clean, predictable, and automated processes that generate the transparent, intelligent reporting necessary to prove the practice’s value and dramatically increase its EBITDA multiple.
• The “Expense Line Item” Mentality for Tech: We oppose viewing technology purely as a cost center to be minimized, rather than as a revenue-generating and value-multiplying asset.
• Passive Payer Contract Management: We are against passively accepting standard payer contract rates without using data intelligence to analyze which contracts are prime for aggressive, data-backed renegotiation.

Category 10: Outdated Human Capital & Incentive Models

• The Misalignment of Incentives: We are against compensation models that reward providers solely on volume without factoring in documentation quality, administrative efficiency, or patient outcomes.
• Any system that forces people to work below their skill level. We oppose the immense waste of having highly-trained providers and skilled administrators spending their valuable time on low-level administrative work—like data entry, phone calls, or scheduling—that could and should be automated. Every minute a clinician spends fighting with a fax machine is a minute they are not providing care.
• The “Siloed Knowledge” Problem: We are against allowing critical process knowledge to exist only in the heads of a few key employees, creating massive operational risk and preventing the practice from scaling.