Reed Liggin spent 26 years watching community hospitals get shortchanged.
Now, as CEO and Co-Founder of SlicedHealth, he is doing something about it.
Picture the billing office of a small community hospital. A claim goes out for a routine procedure. A reimbursement comes back. The transaction looks complete. But the contract the hospital signed says that the procedure should pay $3,000, and what just landed in the account is $2,100.
While each missed charge may seem minor in isolation, the effect compounds quickly, representing a systemic gap that is not the fault of the hospital or the staff. That scenario is not a hypothetical. It is something Reed Liggin, RPh, MBA, has seen play out at hospital after hospital throughout a career that spans more than 26 years in healthcare. It is also the central reason he founded SlicedHealth.
“For most of the hospitals we go into, this is their very first time putting in a payer contract management system,” Liggin said. “Some of them signed a contract a decade ago and the payer has altered the rates year by year ever since. They really don’t know what the rate they should be getting paid. You can’t run any business blind to that information.”
Reed Liggin, CEO and Co-Founder
The Career That Led Here
Liggin started as a pharmacist working in rural hospitals, close enough to the daily realities of community care to understand what those facilities mean to the people who depend on them.
That grounding shaped everything that came after. From early positions in pharmacy and clinical operations, he moved into health IT, eventually holding executive roles at some of the industry’s most recognized names: McKesson, Allscripts, and athenahealth. Each stop added a layer to his understanding of how the system works, and where it consistently lets smaller providers down.
“When you grow up in a town with a small community hospital, or you work inside one early in your career, you realize how important they are,” he said. “Usually after the school system, they’re the number two employer in a county. And it’s really life and death a lot of times. If someone has to drive an hour or more to a big city to get care, in a lot of cases it’s too late.”
That perspective never left him, even as he moved through larger and more complex organizations. The problems facing rural and community providers stayed in his line of sight.
Building Something New
In 2009, Liggin stepped away from the corporate world and started RazorInsights, a cloud-based electronic health record system built specifically for community hospitals. The platform covered clinical departments, nursing, emergency care, and the full suite of business office functions, all designed for the resource constraints of smaller facilities that the major EHR vendors had largely overlooked.
The team was tight-knit, drawn largely from colleagues he had worked alongside at McKesson. They sold the company to athenahealth in January 2015, but one thing stuck with them long after the sale closed.
“Community hospitals were continuously asking us for payer contract management,” Liggin recalled. “At McKesson, we had big contract management systems for large health systems. I never conceived of a hospital not having one. But as we went through RazorInsights, we learned there was a massive gap in the market.”
After the sale, the team went their separate ways for a few years. Liggin went on to lead eazyScripts Technology as CEO before the pull of unfinished business brought the group back together in 2019. The problem they had identified at RazorInsights remained unsolved. If anything, it had gotten worse.
“We said, remember everybody kept asking us about payer contract management? The problem had only gotten tenfold worse. There was a bigger need for it than ever.”
The Problem is Bigger Than Most Realize
Liggin argues that payers have spent years building sophisticated systems that tilt reimbursement decisions in their favor. Community hospitals have not had the tools to respond in kind.
“Payers have been using really sophisticated technology to tilt the scales,” he said. “They’re denying more claims, they’re underpaying more claims. When I talk to CEOs of payer organizations, they’ll say they’re just not getting claims submitted properly. That is part of the story. But the technology inequity between the two sides has given payers a tremendous financial advantage. Part of what we’re doing is giving community hospitals technology that levels the playing field.”
The numbers back him up. SlicedHealth has walked into hospitals and discovered six-figure gaps between what contracts promised and what payers actually delivered. Last year, one Arkansas hospital last year turned up a $250,000 variance. In most cases, hospitals knew something was wrong, they just had no idea what it was costing them.
Medicare Advantage plans, Liggin notes, are among the most frequent offenders. Traditional Medicare is relatively predictable. Managed care plans are not, and the complexity of their payment rules makes them easy to get wrong, and hard for understaffed billing teams to challenge.
“Usually what we find is people know there’s a problem,” he said. “They know they have reimbursement issues. They just don’t know how substantial it is.”
Overcoming the Hesitation
Despite the clear need, getting hospitals to take the first step is not always easy. Contract management systems have been around since the early 1990s, and the institutional memory of how those implementations went is not always fond.
“There’s an assumption that you’re going to need two FTEs just to manage the build, and then another FTE or two to maintain it on an ongoing basis,” Liggin said. “We hear it all the time.”
The answer to that concern is baked into how SlicedHealth delivers the product. The company handles the entire build: loading contracts, rate sheets, fee schedules, and the ongoing maintenance as payer policies change. Hospitals validate and act on the results; they are not responsible for the underlying system work. There are no upfront fees, and the monthly subscription is priced at a fraction of what legacy contract management vendors charge.
“I always invite people to take a look,” Liggin said, “because we’re different, and we do take the heavy lifting off your plate.”
Beyond the product itself, SlicedHealth has built a network of partnerships designed to reach hospitals that might not find them through a traditional sales channel. SlicedHealth works directly with the leading claims clearinghouses and EHRs, creating integrated systems for hospitals and practices.These partnerships give clients a complete contract management suite through a single vendor. They are active in state-level healthcare associations in Texas, Georgia, Nebraska, Iowa, Florida and elsewhere, connecting at the community level with the organizations they serve.
Proven A Noble Cause, and a Practical One
Perhaps the most dangerous position a hospital can be in is believing that existing compliance efforts are sufficient. There is a phrase Liggin comes back to when describing the work. He calls it a noble cause. He means it without any sentiment attached.
“When you work in healthcare, you want to do something that helps people and makes sure lives are saved,” he said. “We feel like we’re contributing to that, and it’s something worth getting up for every day.”
The practical side of that cause is keeping hospitals financially solvent. A community hospital that cannot capture what it is owed on claims cannot stay open. And a hospital that closes is not an abstract economic statistic. It is the only emergency room within 40 miles of a farming community. It is the second-largest employer in a county that does not have many others.
Looking ahead, Liggin expects the financial pressure on community hospitals to get harder before it gets easier. Value-based care arrangements, which shift more financial risk onto providers, are gaining real momentum. Payers and the federal government are pushing them as a mechanism for controlling cost. That shift will require hospitals to track performance data that most of them are not currently equipped to manage.
“Those contracts are quite different from the service contracts we’ve seen,” Liggin said. “As a company, we’ll evolve in how we serve our clients to help them manage those too.”
On the question of automation and where artificial intelligence fits into revenue cycle management, he is measured. Rote, repetitive work will get automated, he says, and that is largely a good thing for teams that are stretched thin. But he does not think the human element disappears.
“I like to say somebody’s got to be the conductor of the orchestra,” he said. “You need somebody to orchestrate what’s happening. I encourage everyone to learn how to work with these tools, because the person who knows how to use them is the one who’s going to thrive.”
For SlicedHealth, the goal is to keep building what community hospitals actually need, not what the market has traditionally offered them. The gap that Liggin first identified in 2009 is still being filled. He seems in no hurry to declare the work done and is in fact, looking to the future for new ways to serve community hospitals.
“Nobody built anything new for the community hospital market in decades.
I like the challenge of bringing something modern and efficient to these hospitals.
Every dollar matters in this space.“
About SlicedHealth
SlicedHealth brings clarity and control to the revenue cycle for health systems and community hospitals. Grounded in hands-on support and built on a rules-based foundation, our platform equips hospital CEOs and CFOs with the tools they need to optimize contract performance, streamline operations without additional staff, and maximize revenue recovery. Our next-generation contract management platform delivers real-time visibility into hospital payer contracts and revenue cycle performance. Driven by SlicedIQ, our AI-powered engine that provides detailed, easy-to-use insights for contract modeling and variance analysis, the SlicedHealth platform automates better decisions across the entire revenue cycle. From claim estimation and business intelligence to a robust price transparency module built for compliance, SlicedHealth helps all hospital leaders recover revenue lost to denials and underpayments. Learn more at https://slicedhealth.com