Beyond days in A/R: Building RCM reporting around human effort

Ask most medical group leaders how they size up revenue cycle health and you’ll hear familiar terms: days in A/R, clean claim pass rate, A/R aging, denial rate. Useful trend lines, yes — yet they rarely tell you where work is accumulating or why cash is slow.

In a 2025 MGMA Summit session, MedEvolve CEO Matt Seefeld and John Peloquin, President and CEO of Discovery Behavioral Health (DBH), argued for a next generation of performance metrics that illuminate real-time human effort and the true cost of inefficiency.

“These new benchmarks that we’ve been able to establish … they really do move the needle,” Peloquin said. “Most organizations are still very subjective in how they look at individuals and their performance.”

Limits of legacy metrics

Traditional measures summarize outcomes after the fact. They rarely expose the workload hidden in getting to those outcomes.

“If I were to go to John and say, ‘Hey, your A/R days are good,’ and leave it at that … none of that tells John, ‘But how many people and touches actually did it take to get my AR to where it is?’” Seefeld noted.

From counts to touches: the operating lens that changes behavior

Seefeld’s frame centers on “touch data” — a record of every human interaction from submission to payment. The north-star measure: the zero-touch rate, or the share of claims paid with no human intervention.

“You collect a payment. Either A, it required nobody, which is what we want. … Or B, it actually required a touch, hopefully only one touch,” Seefeld said. “If it’s more than one touch, we have a real problem.”

Across the industry, about 40% of claims are zero-touch. That leaves a wide field of preventable work. Each unnecessary touch carries a direct labor cost (often $2.50–$8 per touch) and a delay cost as claims wait in queues.

“Every touch costs you money. That reduction down below in cost to collect is a real number,” Seefeld said. “Not only will you improve your labor cost … but you’re also going to improve net revenue.”