As Chief Product Officer and Co-Founder of SlicedHealth, Reese Walker has spent nearly two decades studying the mechanics of healthcare reimbursement. His conclusion: community hospitals are losing money they've already earned, and most of them have no way to see it.
There's a moment in almost every SlicedHealth implementation when something clicks for a client. The platform surfaces the data, and a billing director who has spent years assuming reimbursement was probably fine starts to understand it wasn't. A Medicare Advantage payer had been short on payments for months, maybe longer. The numbers were consistent. They just weren't correct.
Reese Walker has seen that moment play out across hospitals of all sizes, in farm towns in Kansas and regional systems in Georgia and everywhere in between, and it still registers.
"We want to give our hospitals the truth in every claim," Walker says. "If a payer is paying you consistently, but it's wrong, it's not going to help you. Consistent and accurate are two very different things."
That distinction, simple as it sounds, sits at the center of everything SlicedHealth was built to address.
Reese Walker, Chief Product Officer and Co-Founder
The Company Built from a Name
Walker joined SlicedHealth as a co-founder after years of working alongside CEO Reed Liggin and COO Michael McKenzie, first at RazorInsights, then at athenahealth. When the three of them sat down to build something new, they had deep experience in healthcare technology and a shared frustration with the gaps they kept seeing in how community hospitals managed financial data.
Naming the company took longer than expected. Anything with the word "health" attached to it was already taken, trademarked, or registered. They needed something unique they could own completely, including the domain.
"SlicedHealth came up early as an option," Walker recalls. "The idea was we were going to aggregate data, slice and dice it, make it useful. And it was also a nod to RazorInsights, where we had all worked before. You take a slice from a razor. It fit." They set the name aside, worked through dozens of other possibilities, and kept coming back to it. As it took shape, it became clear that this name was the right fit.
The original plan was to aggregate data from electronic health records, clearinghouses, and claims into clean dashboards that hospital teams could actually use. What they built grew well beyond that, shaped in part by what their clients needed and in part by what the regulatory environment demanded. Price transparency requirements, changing payer policies, and a surge in denial rates all pushed the platform in new directions. Walker describes it straightforwardly: they had to be willing to adapt to stay useful.
A Problem That Affects Every Hospital in the Country
Ask Walker how common reimbursement issues are in the hospitals SlicedHealth serves, and he doesn't hedge.
"It's not happening at every small hospital," he says.
"It's happening at every single hospital in the country."
Medicare Advantage plans, in particular, have created a persistent and growing problem for providers. Payers in that space have financial incentive to delay or deny payments, and the complexity of their policies gives them significant room to do it. Denial rates are climbing nationally, and the rules governing what gets paid, what gets appealed, and what qualifies as medically necessary change constantly and vary by payer.
Large health systems can absorb some of this. They have the staff and the technology to audit reimbursements at scale, track variances, and push back on underpayments. Independent hospitals with 25 to 400 beds, the ones not part of a major network, generally don't have those resources. They're fighting the same battles with a fraction of the firepower.
"When you look at auditing claims, our software can audit 100% of your claims," Walker explains. "If you have a person doing it, maybe they can touch 10 to 15%. That's not where you start finding the trends and the outliers that matter."
The goal isn't to reduce headcount. Walker is clear about that. The goal is to wick away the work that doesn't require human judgment, so the people who know this space can spend their time on the things that do.
Not Just Where. Why.
One of the things Walker describes with particular satisfaction is the moment a client realizes the data isn't just telling them where revenue is being lost, it's telling them why. Sometimes the source is a payer policy change that slipped through without anyone noticing. Sometimes it's a coding pattern that's been quietly costing money for months.
He walks through a scenario that comes up often: a procedure is being coded a certain way, and every time it's coded that way, the claim comes back underpaid. It's happened a hundred times. Each one is $100 short. That's $10,000 over a month that nobody caught because nobody had a system looking for it.
"Once you can show that to a physician," Walker says, "you can have the conversation. It's not a personal accusation. It's data. This specific coding decision has cost the facility $50,000 over the last year. Now there's something concrete to work with."
That kind of visibility, the ability to identify both the financial impact and the process change needed to fix it, is where Walker sees the platform delivering value that goes well beyond a report.
Why Rural Hospitals. Why This Work.
Walker's connection to community hospitals runs deeper than market strategy. Through his years at RazorInsights and athenahealth, he spent time in communities where the local hospital was the only healthcare option for a significant radius, and where the financial fragility of that hospital was not an abstraction.
"You're talking about a community of 200 people, a hospital district serving 40,000 across 10 counties, and the closest thing to a restaurant is a Subway attached to a gas station," Walker says. "But if somebody in that town has a heart attack, they've got to go to that hospital. When minutes matter, that's what they have."
He's not sentimental about it in a way that softens the business reality. He's clear-eyed. These hospitals are not built to generate large margins, and nearly all of them operate at some level of financial risk. What that means, practically, is that every dollar of underpayment carries more weight than it would in a large system.
"We call it a noble cause," he says, "and I think it is. These hospitals are there to serve their communities. Anything we can do to help them stay financially stable, that matters."
On AI, Automation, and the Last Mile
Walker thinks carefully about where AI fits into revenue cycle work, and where it doesn't. He's not skeptical of the technology, but he's not willing to oversell it either.
"I'm not sold on the idea that AI is going to remove people from the entire process," he says.
"I always think that last mile of doing the work has to be done by a person. Payers are going to put stops in place. If you figure out how to automate something, they'll find a way to make it harder."
What he does believe is that tools like SlicedIQ can take everything up to that last mile and handle it well. Pattern recognition, audit work, variance identification, and data analysis at scale. All of that can be automated, and when it is, the billing team is free to focus on the work that actually requires expertise: crafting the appeal, navigating the reconsideration, having the conversation with a physician about a coding change.
He frames the goal simply: eliminate friction. Make the process as clean as possible, load the contracts and fee schedules and payer methodologies, surface what matters, and let the people who understand this work focus on it.
A Team That's Been Here Before
One of the things Walker mentions when asked about the founding team is the length of those relationships. Reed Liggin, Michael McKenzie, and Walker have worked together in some combination since around 2011. Alex McManus and Ken Jackson joined the mix somewhat later, but even those connections span a decade or more.
They don't all do the same thing, and Walker is direct about that. Reed leads as CEO. Michael runs operations. Ken brings the CFO perspective and the client-facing experience that comes with it. Alex owns the development side. Walker lives in product, billing, and claims, the subject matter that runs through everything the platform does.
What He Wants to See Next
Looking ahead five to ten years, Walker sees two things that need to change in the payer-provider relationship. One is structural: there should be more standardization around how payer policies are published, how appeals are handled, and how medical necessity determinations are made. Right now, those processes vary so widely from payer to payer that keeping track of them is a significant operational burden in itself.
The other thing he wants to see is simpler, and maybe more idealistic: providers and payers finding ways to reduce the back-and-forth that costs both sides time and money.
"Rework costs money on both sides," he says. "If we could get to a place where you submit a clean claim and it just gets paid, you eliminate so much friction. The hospitals are happy, the payers are happy. That's not even really AI, that's just cleaner processes. But getting there would be something."
Until then, SlicedHealth's role stays the same: build the tools that help community hospitals see what's happening, understand why, and act on it before the money is gone for good.
For Walker, that's not a narrow technology problem. It's the reason the work matters.
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