Outsourcing Doesn’t Fix Anything. Here’s What Does.
Why the traditional outsourcing model is broken and what revenue cycle actually needs instead.
Written by Andrew Franchett
Every health system eventually hits the same wall. AR is aging. Denials are piling up. Leadership is under pressure from Finance. The backlog feels unmanageable.
The standard response is also always the same: bring in more people. A contingency vendor, an offshore team, a staffing surge. Work gets touched. Some of it moves. Then the next quarter looks a lot like the last one.
The issue isn’t a lack of effort. The real problem is that traditional outsourcing was never meant to solve the root issues.
What Traditional Outsourcing Actually Does
The conventional outsourcing model is built around task completion. Accounts get worked. Calls get made. Queues get touched. Vendors report activity: volume handled, accounts reviewed, touches logged. And bill accordingly.
But it never asks why those accounts needed attention in the first place.
Most revenue cycle dysfunction isn’t a capacity problem. It’s a structural one. Work queues go to inactive users, denial workflows have coding gaps, and billing holds sit unnoticed. Credit balances age because no one is responsible for them. Meanwhile, staff spend hours on low-value tasks instead of focusing on high-dollar recovery.
Traditional outsourcing moves work offsite. It doesn’t fix the system producing the work. So the volume keeps coming, the vendor keeps billing, and the underlying dysfunction keeps compounding. The incentives are actually aligned against resolution. If the root causes get fixed, the work goes away.
A Different Starting Point
SparkSourcing takes a different approach. The goal isn’t just to finish tasks—it’s to make those tasks unnecessary in the first place.
So, the first step is always to diagnose the real issues. What’s actually broken? Where is work piling up, and why? What can be automated, so people don’t have to touch it? Where is real expertise needed, and is it being used where it matters most?
The Fundamental Difference
Traditional outsourcing processes work. SparkChange eliminates it.
Week 0The answers are almost always structural. And the fix is almost never more headcount.
When automation takes care of routine tasks—like balance progressions, credit resolutions, proration mismatches, small-balance write-offs, and zero-balance movement—things change. Staff no longer waste hours on work that doesn’t need their judgment. Instead, they can focus on denials, appeals, and high-value accounts where their expertise really matters. The whole system becomes faster and smarter.
The Compounding Advantage
This is where the model diverges most sharply from traditional outsourcing.
Contingency vendors are set up to react. They wait for problems to appear, then address them. Each cycle looks about the same, and there’s no way for the system to get better over time—because real improvement would mean less billable work.
Automation compounds. Each workflow automated is a permanent reduction in manual volume. Each structural fix prevents downstream problems from recurring. Each cycle, the system handles more with less intervention. The work decreases as the operation becomes stronger. The opposite of what traditional outsourcing produces.
That’s not a philosophical distinction. It shows up in the numbers. AR drops and stays down. Aging buckets shrink. Cash collections improve. Finance and operations, stop arguing about why the same problems keep coming back.
Where the Model Starts to Break
The results begin to surface quickly when the focus shifts from effort to structure.
In the first week of a recent project, over $800,000 in payments were resolved in a group marked for external follow-up, without any extra effort. At the same time, automation and workflow improvements started cutting down both the backlog and new incoming work.
This leads to a different kind of question.
If that much of the work resolves on its own, and more can be eliminated through system changes, how much of the remaining volume actually needs to exist?
This is where the cracks in the traditional outsourcing model become undeniable, none more obvious than in the handling of small balances.
What SparkSourcing Actually Is
SparkSourcing is an embedded operating model. Automation continuously absorbs routine AR work. Analytics provide daily visibility into every claim, balance, and denial. Human expertise is applied only where it drives material financial impact, and the definition of where that is gets sharper over time.
The client defines the thresholds. SparkChange builds and runs the automation against them. Backlog reduction and steady-state control operate in parallel, not sequentially. The model scales without expanding permanent staffing, and performance is transparent at every stage.
It is not outsourcing with better branding. It is a fundamentally different answer to the question that most health systems are still asking wrong.
The real question isn’t who should do this work. It’s why does this work exist, and how can we make sure it goes away?
