A denial arrives from a payer overnight. By the time the revenue-cycle lead logs in, the agent has worked through the remit and the supporting chart note your team pulled in, drafted an appeal letter, and parked it in a Dock row tagged for the lead. The lead reviews at 8:00, edits one sentence, and approves. The appeal goes back to the payer with the lead's name on it and the agent's reasoning preserved. That is the shape of Dock for healthcare operations applied to the revenue cycle.
A note on the name of this post. It used to describe this workflow alongside Olive AI. Olive AI shut down in 2023. The workflow itself never depended on Olive: it runs the same way with whatever RCM tool, clearinghouse, or payer portal your team uses today.
Healthcare data is sensitive. Hold any tool, Dock included, to your own HIPAA policies and your compliance team's review before you connect clinical systems.
Your RCM tool, Cerner, and Epic stay the system of record for the raw data: the 835 remit, the encounter, the chart, the prior-auth thread. Dock holds the work around that data: what the agent interprets, the drafted appeal, the reasoning, and who approved it. Every Dock row carries a pointer back to the source record (rcm_denial_id, cerner_encounter_id, epic_claim_id), the agent, the reviewer's sign-off, and the timestamps on both sides. Your team checks current claim status in the RCM tool with its own access, because that system owns current state.
The Dock denial-appeal table
| denial_id | rcm_denial_id | epic_claim_id | denial_reason | agent_draft | reviewer | status |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| DEN-7821 | rcm_44a | clm_99812 | CO-50, medical necessity | Drafted MN appeal citing CDI note 2026-05-22, ICD-10 N18.6 | nora.s@health.org | approved 2026-05-30 08:14 |
| DEN-7822 | rcm_44b | clm_99813 | CO-197, no prior auth | Drafted retro-auth request with op-note excerpt | nora.s@health.org | needs revision |
| DEN-7823 | rcm_44c | clm_99814 | CO-16, missing modifier | Drafted corrected claim with modifier 25, no appeal needed | nora.s@health.org | resubmitted 2026-05-30 09:02 |
One workflow, end to end
Each morning, a biller exports the overnight denials from the RCM tool and brings them into Dock, along with the encounter and claim details the team pulls from Cerner and Epic with its own access. The agent classifies each denial code and writes a draft appeal into a new Dock row, with a pointer back to every source record and its name as drafter. The revenue-cycle lead opens the row, sees the agent's cited evidence inline, edits the medical-necessity paragraph, and approves. Only after that approval does the team send the appeal through its RCM tool or payer portal. The row stays in Dock as the lasting record: who drafted, who approved, what the payer saw, when it went out.
Why this matters
Initial claim denials hit 11.8% in 2024, up from 10.2% a few years prior, and hospitals lose an average of 4.8% of net revenue to denials, per HFMA's denials research HFMA, 2024. The administrative cost to rework a single commercial denial averages $63.76. Volume matters, but attribution matters more. When an appeal goes out drafted by an agent and approved by a named lead, the history is intact, and CDI specialists can review root causes rather than rerun the same denial loop, which AHIMA identifies as the core of effective denials prevention AHIMA Journal, claims-denials archive.
Shared logins cannot carry this weight. A shared bot account drafting appeals is the same as no signature at all. Agent identity is what makes the row mean something to a payer, an auditor, or a CDI lead. Audit trails and compliance live in the Dock row, not in a log file no one reads.
Finance leadership cares about this because attributed denial work can shorten the appeal cycle and shrink the write-off pool, which is why this pattern shows up on the Dock for finance page as well as the Dock for compliance page. Same row, two audiences.
Set up your revenue-cycle workspace in Dock.
FAQ
Q: We used Olive AI. What changes? Olive AI shut down in 2023. Swap in whatever RCM tool you use now. Dock holds the agent's draft, the reviewer's approval, and the pointer back to the denial in that tool.
Q: What happens if the payer disputes the appeal? The Dock row is the record. It shows which agent drafted, which lead approved, and which Cerner and Epic records were cited. The revenue-cycle lead can share it with the payer without reconstructing the story.
Q: Can the agent send appeals without a human? Not in this workflow. The agent drafts every appeal, including simple ones like a missing modifier. A named person approves and sends it. See agent identity for how the agent's access works.
Q: How does this affect coder workload? Coders stop rerunning the same denial loop. The agent drafts, the lead approves, and CDI specialists get a Dock view of root-cause patterns instead of a queue of one-off appeals.