As Chief Technology Officer at SlicedHealth, Alex McManus leads the engineering behind solutions that give rural hospitals the insights they need to know where they’re being underpaid. By persisting to overcome complex technical challenges while keeping his team aligned with the human needs behind them, he’s helping shore up rural healthcare and the communities they serve.
Alex McManus, Chief Technology Officer at SlicedHealth, knows how to keep his priorities straight. It boils down to this: be on the forefront of AI and technology, but don’t let it distract you from the human problems at hand. Instead, understand the core challenges first, then analyze how technology can be leveraged to solve them, not the other way around.
Alex McManus, Chief Technology Officer
Giving Back the Power
McManus’s path to SlicedHealth grew out of years navigating federal healthcare mandates. At major EHR vendors like Allscripts, Greenway, and athenahealth, he led development around complex legislative standards like Meaningful Use and the 21st Century Cures Act. While developing audit logging frameworks and managing the technology architecture at RazorInsights, he worked with Reed Liggin, Michael McKenzie and Reese Walker.
When McManus teamed up with them again at SlicedHealth, the draw was clear. "At RazorInsights, we saw how much rural health systems were struggling," he says. "SlicedHealth was an opportunity to take part in building the business intelligence solutions they typically can’t afford to implement on their own—giving them the power of dedicated data analytics without a massive financial overhead."
Building Better from the Ground Up
His commitment to practical engineering showed up early in how SlicedHealth approached federal price transparency mandates. While many software vendors patched existing legacy products to meet baseline requirements, McManus and his team chose to build a proprietary contract management solution from the ground up.
"We didn’t want to just maintain a legacy system; we wanted to solve the underlying operational challenge," McManus explains. "So, we built an architecture that handles complex, variable payer contract logic. That engine didn't just satisfy transparency regulations - it became the foundation for SlicedHealth variance analysis and claim estimation tools."
That persistence also drove one of SlicedHealth’s engineering team’s most significant behind-the-scenes milestones: integrating the full line of CMS Prospective Payment System (PPS) pricers. Crucial for accurately modeling Medicare Advantage reimbursement, the open-source libraries provided by CMS came with virtually no documentation. Getting them to work required rigorous trial, error and testing.
"It’s one of those capabilities a customer will never know was extraordinarily difficult to build," McManus says. "But it was worth the significant effort and gives them a far more accurate understanding of what they should be reimbursed."
Connecting Code to Community Impact
To maintain rapid development cycles and provide quick responsiveness, McManus oversees an engineering team distributed across the globe.
He also works intentionally to ensure distance never disconnects engineers from the human realities of rural healthcare. The team stays closely paired with customer-facing teams and regular internal show-and-tells focus not just on feature demos, but on how a specific approach helps solve a hospital’s financial bottleneck.
"When people understand the impact behind the code, their purpose is clear and the work means something entirely different," McManus says.
Demystifying AI for Leaders Who Need to Know
For hospital boards and financial officers evaluating the use of AI within their revenue cycle operations, McManus encourages them to view AI as a force multiplier that scales human insight and expertise.
"AI isn't about replacing the skilled personnel inside the hospital," McManus explains. "It’s about helping existing teams analyze far more information, spot payment anomalies faster and summarize complex contracts without continually adding headcount."
Addressing any security concerns hospital leadership may have, McManus stresses that adopting AI does not require a trade off of data privacy or HIPAA compliance. SlicedHealth’s architecture, backed by SOC 2 Type II certification, he explains, enforces strict boundaries around sensitive data:
- Zero Model Training: Client data is never used by SlicedHealth or its AI vendors to train third-party language models.
- Zero Data Retention: Vendor agreements require immediate data purge after processing.
- Full Encryption and BAAs: Information is encrypted both in transit and at rest, supported by formal Business Associate Agreements.
"It’s not about handing decisions over to an AI model," McManus says. "We design clear guardrails and human-in-the-loop workflows around what we offer, so that every output can be trusted, validated and reviewed by hospital personnel."
Data Leverage Where It Matters Most
Ultimately, what drives McManus in his role is witnessing rural hospitals use SlicedHealth's tools to confidently face and negotiate with national payers.
"Historically, when a smaller hospital faces a massive national payer, there has been a vast imbalance in the data and resources each side brings to that negotiation," McManus says. "Seeing our clients enter into those conversations armed with the data to challenge inaccurate reimbursement and confidently advocate for what they are owed is incredibly rewarding."
About SlicedHealth
SlicedHealth has always solved one version of the same problem: hospitals cannot protect revenue they cannot see. Grounded in hands-on support and built on a rules-based foundation, our platform equips hospital leadership with the tools they need to elevate contract performance, streamline operations without additional staff, and maximize revenue protection. Our AI-powered engine provides detailed, easy-to-use insights for contract modeling, variance analysis, administrative tasks, and operational workflows. From claim estimation and business intelligence to federal compliance and operational efficiency, SlicedHealth helps all hospital leaders protect every dollar earned. Learn more at https://slicedhealth.com