The Wellness Edition | Issue 30 | May 5, 2026

May is Mental Health Awareness Month. If you run a behavioral health practice, this issue is for you. If you run a med spa, PT clinic, or dental office, it's still for you. Because the billing problem I'm about to describe doesn't care what kind of wellness business you operate.

If you think your operations don’t impact your real estate strategy, you’re already paying for it.

Not in rent.

In the revenue you never collect.

Because every dollar lost in billing, denials, and coding errors doesn’t just hit your P&L, itt quietly limits what you can afford, where you can go next, and whether ownership is even an option.  

Here's the number 41% of healthcare providers now report that at least one in ten of their claims gets denied. That's up from 30% in 2022. According to Experian Health's 2025 State of Claims report, 54% of providers say denials are still increasing. Each denied claim costs $25 to $118 to rework, and 65% of denied claims are never resubmitted. That revenue is not deferred. It's gone.

For a wellness practice doing $1 million to $5 million a year in revenue, a 10% denial rate with a 65% abandonment rate means you are quietly losing $65,000 to $325,000 in annual revenue that you already earned. You did the work. You saw the patient. And you walked away from the money because your billing process couldn't close the loop.

AI is closing that loop. Here's how.

Three layers of AI are attacking the billing problem inside wellness practices right now. Pre-submission scrubbing, denial management, and coding accuracy. You don't need all three at once. You need whichever one is costing you the most money today.

Layer 1: Pre-submission claim scrubbing.

This is where most of the money gets saved. AI-powered tools review every claim line by line before it goes to the payer, catching errors that would trigger a denial. athenaOne by athenahealth automates this process and reports that practices on their platform may see 50 to 70% less revenue cycle work through AI-assisted claim processing. That's not a marginal improvement. That's cutting your billing team's rework burden in half.

Layer 2: Denial management and appeals.

When a claim does get denied, AI can draft the appeal letter, match it to payer-specific language, and route it for resubmission in minutes instead of days. Waystar, which acquired Iodine Software for AI-powered clinical documentation, automates claim processing end to end. Aspirion reports roughly 10% higher success rates on AI-assisted clinical appeal letters compared to manual drafting. That 10% improvement applied to a practice with $200,000 in annual denials is $20,000 recovered. Every year. Automatically.

Layer 3: AI-powered coding.

NLP-powered coding tools read clinical documentation and suggest the correct billing codes, reducing coding errors by 15 to 25%. For a wellness practice, coding errors are one of the leading causes of preventable denials. Fix the codes upstream and you fix the denial rate downstream. This is often the layer that pays for itself fastest.

Special note for behavioral health practices.

May is Mental Health Awareness Month, and the behavioral health billing environment is uniquely painful. Session-based billing, modifier complexity, and payer-specific documentation requirements make behavioral health claims some of the most denial-prone in healthcare. Grow Therapy has built an AI care companion that bridges in-session therapy with 24/7 patient support, improving outcomes while generating the kind of documentation that payers actually want to see. If you're a therapist, counselor, or psychiatrist running a practice in Tampa Bay, the AI tools available to you today are meaningfully better than what existed 18 months ago.

And here's the thing I keep saying because it keeps being true: the billing tools only capture revenue you've already earned. They don't create new patients. They don't fix why patients leave after two visits. If your patient experience strategy isn't generating the visits in the first place, faster billing just helps you collect revenue you're under-earning.

My colleague Ebony Langston works on exactly this. Her newsletter, The Patient Experience Strategist, maps how patients actually move through a practice and where the revenue leaks before billing ever touches it. Strategy first. Tools second. That order still matters. 

patientexperiencestrategist.com/newsletter.

When a wellness tenant's billing runs clean, their cash flow is predictable. When their cash flow is predictable, they sign longer leases, negotiate less aggressively on rent, and don't call you in month 14 asking for relief.

The flip side is worth knowing. Claim denial rates above 10% surged from 30% of providers in 2022 to 41% in 2025. If your tenant is in that 41%, their revenue is leaking and they may not even know it. When you underwrite a wellness tenant in 2026, ask about their billing technology. Not because you're their consultant. Because a tenant using AI for billing tends to be lower risk than one running a manual revenue cycle.

CommonSpirit Health, one of the largest U.S. health systems, reports AI-driven initiatives contributing to over $100M in annual savings.  Scale that down. If AI captures just 5% more revenue through better billing inside your $2 million wellness practice, that's $100,000. That's enough to shift the own-versus-lease calculation. That's enough to fund a buildout. That's enough to make the SBA 504 numbers pencil on a purchase you've been on the fence about. The AI isn't just fixing your billing. It's changing your real estate math.

athenaOne by athenahealth is the AI-native EHR platform built around revenue cycle automation. Predictive tools for no-show forecasting, automated claim scrubbing, HCC gap detection, and denial management, all in one system. It's not the cheapest EHR on the market. It's designed to pay for itself through the revenue it captures. For wellness practices in the $1M to $5M range, athenaOne is worth a conversation.

Florida launched the Health Care Innovation Revolving Loan Program in October 2025. The program provides up to $5 million per project at a maximum 1% interest rate, with $50 million appropriated annually through 2034. It funds innovative healthcare solutions including technology adoption. The initial application window has closed, but the program is annual. If you're a wellness operator in Tampa Bay considering AI implementation and need capital, this should be on your radar for the next cycle. It's one of the most favorable funding mechanisms for healthcare technology adoption I've seen at the state level.

I spent years inside healthcare operations watching billing departments fight the same fires every month. Wrong code. Missing modifier. Authorization that expired before the claim was filed. It was a grind, and the people doing the work were talented and exhausted. They weren't making mistakes because they were careless. They were making mistakes because the volume outran the staffing.

AI doesn't replace those people. It removes the part of their job that was impossible to do consistently at volume. The claim gets scrubbed before it leaves the building. The appeal gets drafted in minutes instead of hours. The coding suggestion catches the error before it becomes a denial. The people are still there. They're just working on the hard stuff instead of the repetitive stuff. That's the real return.

May is Mental Health Awareness Month. If you run a behavioral health practice and the billing complexity is costing you revenue, reply to this email and I'll send you a curated list of the AI tools built specifically for your specialty. For everyone else: if your billing process is leaving money on the table and you want to know how your real estate strategy fits into the recovery plan, book a Q2 strategy session here: 

calendly.com/leigh-a-brower.

Until next week,

Leigh A. Brower

Fractional Chief Real Estate Officer

The Next Gen Dev | The Wellness Edition

The Next Gen Dev - Wellness Edition is your weekly briefing on the strategies and frameworks that separate wellness businesses building the future from those stuck in the past.