Spotlight: Brian Tucker @ Televero Behavioral Health
A spotlight is a short-form interview with a leader in health tech. In this spotlight, you'll hear from Brian Tucker, CDO of Televero Behavioral Health.
What does Televero Behavioral Health do?
We deliver behavioral health care 100% online across 41 states. Therapy, psychiatry, medication management, and neuroscreening. Someone in a rural county gets the same access as someone in New York City, seven days a week, 365 days a year.
We're a board-licensed medical practice, and every care team is led by a physician. Patients get a team of providers who specialize in their specific needs, not a one-to-one match with a single provider the way an app works.
The clinical need isn't the hard part. Access and economics are. Most people who need care still can't get it, and a lot of what exists is cash-pay or out of network, which shuts out the people who need it most. We take all insurance, so cost isn't the reason someone goes without care. Staying solvent while doing that is the hard part, which is why most companies chasing this gap are either nonprofits or they lose money. Behavioral health runs on some of the thinnest margins in healthcare. On margins that thin, an owner needs certainty and predictability to survive. Variability takes both away. The same task done one way by whoever's on shift today and another way tomorrow is enough, on its own, to put a practice underwater. We're around 200 people, growing fast, and we do all of it while staying in the black, which in this space is rare.
How did you end up working in health tech?
I didn't come up through healthcare. I spent 30 years fixing operations and revenue in enterprise high tech, work that has carried me across more than 40 industries. The work was always the same shape. Find where a business leaks money, figure out why, and rebuild the process so it can't leak that way again.
Healthcare is the most broken system I've worked in. We viscerally reject "that's just the way healthcare is." For example, an airline knows its unit economics down to a single seat. Healthcare mostly doesn't, and the revenue cycle industry makes it worse by fixating on revenue. Revenue is a vanity metric. No owner ever made payroll with a number on a report.
An owner lives and dies on cash flow and EBITDA. Not one person on their staff is measured on either. The collections report can look healthy while the owner covers payroll out of a personal bank account, floating 60 to 90 days for money the practice already earned. So many practices operate exactly this way. Strong top line, and a monthly cash infusion just to keep the doors open.
That's why we work RCM in reverse. Start at the operating P&L and cash position, then trace back to the exact spot the money is stuck and close it so it never happens again. That's always job one. Most businesses try to solve it later, which is backwards. Televero is where we run it from the inside, like the operator on the hook for the outcome, and Stedi is now a core part of how we accelerate and scale that as the business grows.
How does your role intersect with revenue cycle management (RCM)?
RCM is a big part of my job, even though it's not in my title. As CDO I own the data, the systems, the operations, and digital marketing teams. In behavioral health, RCM is where cash is won or lost, so that's where I live.
Most companies treat RCM as a staffing problem. Hire more billers, chase more denials, add people when volume grows. I treat it as a data problem. As it's usually run, RCM is really an A/R collection business. Care gets delivered, claims go out, then a team spends weeks chasing denials and working aged accounts, and a billing vendor takes 5 to 7% of collections for the privilege. All of that is downstream of the real problem.
We moved it upstream. One fix in the right place moves four numbers at once: denial rate, collection rate, write-offs, and days in A/R. Take eligibility. Verify it before the visit, not after the denial, and all four move without anyone working harder. At Televero we built a data and automation layer that enforces eligibility, authorization, coding, and documentation at the point of care. Claims go out clean the first time. First-pass approval sits at 97%, we collect about 90% of what's owed at the point of service, and cash lands in roughly 12 days against an industry benchmark of 60 to 90. That took Televero cash-positive for the first time in its history, about six months ahead of plan.
None of it works when your data is trapped or your clearinghouse is a black box. The legacy model hands you batch files and opaque responses you can't build on. Structured, real-time data is the raw material for the whole model. Stedi gives us that, eligibility and claims and ERAs coming back clean and reliable enough to automate against. Reliable data turns cash from a monthly question into something you can predict. That's the difference between guessing where your revenue is and knowing.
What do you think RCM will look like two years from now?
Two years out, the manual RCM army starts to shrink. Not because people get swapped for software overnight, but because the work they grind through by hand finally gets real structural fixes. And those fixes show up where owners and investors actually keep score, in cash and EBITDA.
Three bets. First, the black-box clearinghouse is finished. Initial claim denials hit 11.6% in 2025 and are still climbing, and the Change Healthcare outage that took the country's largest clearinghouse down for almost two weeks showed everyone what happens when your billing depends on infrastructure you can't see or control. API-first stops being the exception. Second, AI agents take over the repetitive core of the cycle instead of offshoring. Eligibility exceptions, denial rework, claim status, posting. Third, the smart operators quit treating RCM as overhead and run it as a data function that protects cash, with real-time visibility into every dollar in the pipeline.
The companies that make that move collect more and collect it faster, with fewer people grinding through it. The people who used to work queues get freed up for higher-value work at the top of their skill range, and that makes the business healthier. In this field, a healthier business is what lets you reach more patients and get more of them well.