Walt Whitman's advice -- "be curious, not judgmental" -- was made famous in a dartboard scene from the TV show Ted Lasso, where Ted turns the table on an opponent who assumed he couldn't play. The opponent judged without investigating. Ted had been playing darts his whole life.
It's a small moment, but it maps directly onto something I see constantly in healthcare finance. Organizations dismiss opportunities not because they've evaluated them carefully, but because they've judged them on the surface. Too complicated. Too good to be true. Not how we do things here.
The hospitals finding real traction on revenue and cost challenges share one trait: they got curious before they got comfortable saying no.
What Judgment Actually Costs
When hospital leaders dismiss revenue and cost opportunities without genuine investigation, the financial drag is real and it compounds. Here are three areas where I see judgment -- rather than curiosity -- consistently costing organizations money:
Revenue Cycle Management
Many organizations assume their internal billing team is performing adequately. The data from independent benchmarking consistently tells a different story -- denial rates, collection timelines, and first-pass acceptance rates all have meaningful room for improvement in most health systems.
"Are we actually benchmarking our RCM performance, or just assuming it's fine?"
Medical Records Synchronization
Fragmented patient records across health systems create clinical risk and missed reimbursement opportunities simultaneously. Most EHRs only capture what happened locally. A curious leader asks what's being missed from the 2,500+ external sources that hold the rest of a patient's history.
"How much of our patient population has relevant history sitting outside our EHR?"
ITAD Compliance
IT asset disposition is one of the most consistently misjudged areas in healthcare operations. Organizations assume their current vendor is handling it correctly. Independent analysis regularly finds compliance gaps, chain-of-custody exposure, and unrealized recovery value that the vendor had no incentive to surface.
"When did we last have someone with no vendor relationship review our ITAD process?"
The Pattern Behind Each Missed Opportunity
These three areas look different on the surface but share a common structure. In each case, a specialist with deep, narrow expertise in one specific problem can find and address something that a generalist internal team -- managing full operational volume -- simply doesn't have the bandwidth or the payer-specific or vendor-neutral vantage point to catch.
The judgment that blocks action usually sounds like one of these:
- "Our team already handles that" -- without asking whether the team has the tools and capacity to handle it at the level a specialist would
- "We looked at that a few years ago" -- without asking whether the landscape, the vendors, or the available programs have changed since then
- "That sounds too good to be true" -- which is a reasonable instinct, but one that requires verification rather than dismissal
Curiosity doesn't mean accepting every pitch uncritically. It means asking the questions that would let you make an informed decision rather than a reflexive one.
Curiosity as a Financial Discipline
The organizations I work with that move fastest on these opportunities share a practical trait: they are genuinely willing to look at what an independent outside perspective finds, even when they expect the answer to be "nothing significant." In many cases that expectation is wrong.
ITAD assessments consistently surface compliance gaps that the existing vendor had no incentive to disclose. RCM benchmarking regularly identifies collection performance that looks acceptable internally but falls well short of what a specialist partner achieves. Medical records synchronization programs identify reimbursable care gaps that the local EHR had no visibility into.
None of these require upfront investment to investigate. The curiosity costs nothing. The judgment, it turns out, is what's expensive.
Get Curious About What Your Organization Might Be Missing
An independent look at any of these areas costs nothing. If there's no meaningful opportunity, we'll tell you. If there is, we'll show you exactly what it looks like before anything else changes hands.
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