Spotlight: Cissy Mangrum @ National Data Solutions

A spotlight is a short-form interview with a leader in health tech. In this spotlight, you'll hear from Cissy Mangrum, Chief RCM Officer of National Data Solutions.

What does NDS do?

At NDS, we believe technology should do more than create dashboards, automate tasks, or generate another report. It should produce measurable performance. That belief is behind a simple statement we make about our company: We put our fees where our findings are.

Our CEO, Brett McParland, founded NDS in 2022. In 2024, I joined as CRO of NDS and Co-Founder of RevTech Partners (RTP). Since then, we have continued to bring together industry experts with deep experience across healthcare and dental operations, revenue cycle management, finance, data, and technology. The vision was bigger than building another technology company. We wanted to build an ecosystem capable of challenging the way things have always been done, combining decades of industry knowledge with data, technology, and AI to fundamentally improve the processes that drive healthcare and dental organizations.

We did not start with technology and then go looking for a problem to solve. And we did not build one piece of technology to fix one isolated problem, believing it would somehow change everything. No. We started with the problems we have experienced firsthand, the problems we know are interconnected, and built an ecosystem designed to solve them together. Our philosophy within our company is simple: Surety + Technology = Performance

Surety comes from experience, the confidence of knowing how operations should work, where revenue leaks occur, why workflows break down, and what actually drives financial and operational performance.

Technology gives us the ability to connect data, automate processes, identify opportunities, and scale those best practices across an organization.

Performance comes when those two work together.

Building the Bedrock

The foundation begins with data. Our DataVault creates the connectivity layer across the organization, bringing together information from practice management and EMR platforms with finance, HR, procurement, revenue cycle, and the other systems required to operate a modern dental or healthcare organization. Instead of critical information living in disconnected systems, DataVault creates the foundation for an enterprise-wide view of the organization. Additionally, we provide services to support the infrastructure behind the business to ensure the business is secure, connected, reliable, and able to support growth with our Local IT services, Enterprise IT services, Integration Services, and development services. But connecting the data is only the beginning. With the foundation of our technology and services, it was time to turn data into action. So the question became: what can we do with data?

We have built the first of 8 suites, the RCM Suite, which launched on July 1, 2026. It focuses on revenue cycle technologies with experts to guide the practices and DSOs that address the operational challenges our teams have spent their careers solving:

• Payer-IQ – Payer identification, strategy, reimbursement analysis, and underpayment identification

• Recon-IQ – Full revenue reconciliation designed to determine whether the money that should have been received was actually received, posted, and accounted for.

• Denial-IQ – Full-service denial intelligence and management designed to identify, prioritize, resolve, and ultimately prevent denials.

• Coding-IQ – Coding and documentation review designed to improve accuracy, compliance, and revenue integrity.

• Patient-IQ – Patient accounts receivable and communication designed to improve the patient financial experience while increasing collections.

• Coverage-IQ – Eligibility, benefits, authorization, and treatment-plan intelligence platform in one designed to improve visibility into coverage before treatment and reduce downstream revenue cycle problems.

• Onboarding-IQ – Credentialing and payer onboarding designed to improve visibility, accountability, and speed throughout the enrollment process.

Additionally, on July 1, 2026, we launched two fully AI-integrated data platforms: InsightFlow (Reporting) and Training-IQ (Learning management system). What makes these technologies different is not simply the use of AI. It is who built them, why we built them, and the operational knowledge behind them.

Our next round of suites and services, coming in the next several months, includes RCM Support Services, Financial Support Services, and the Financial Suite of Technology, which includes Assurance-IQ (Compliance) and Fraud-IQ (Fraud Detection). Additional suites arrive in early to mid 2027.

We put our fees where our findings are. If our experts and technology identify an opportunity for improvement, we are confident enough to stand behind that finding. And if we agree on the results we believe we can produce, then we believe our compensation should be tied to our ability to deliver them. Our clients should not have to carry all the risk while a consulting or technology company simply collects its fee regardless of the outcome. Because at the end of the day, another dashboard isn’t the goal. Another piece of technology isn’t the goal. Better performance is the goal.

How did you end up working in health tech?

After more than 30 years working inside healthcare operations and revenue cycle, I had seen just about every version of the same problems, from just about every specialty. I worked across hospital systems, physician practices, medical service operations, and dental service operations, and I saw the same disconnected systems, manual processes, revenue leakage, denials, and technology that promised to fix everything but often solved only one small piece of a much bigger problem. Then I met Brett McParland. What started as conversations about one piece of technology led to a conversation about healthcare, dental, data, technology, and the problems we both saw in the industry, and it quickly became something bigger. Brett came at those problems from the technology, operations, and data side, and I came at them from the operational and revenue cycle side with a clinical background. We realized we were looking at many of the same problems through two very different, but complementary, lenses.

In September of 2024, Brett asked me to join him, not simply to work for another health tech company, but to help build the disruptor we believed the industry needed. That was what pulled me into health tech. The opportunity wasn’t to take an existing piece of software and figure out how to sell it; it was to start with the problems we had experienced firsthand and ask, Why are we still doing it this way? Together, we began building an ecosystem that combines industry expertise, data, technology, and AI to challenge the status quo and change how the work actually gets done. That is how I ended up in health tech: I didn’t leave healthcare for technology. I brought what 30 years in the industry working from the ground up taught me into technology so we could build something better.

How does your role intersect with revenue cycle management (RCM)?

Revenue cycle management isn’t simply something my role intersects with; it is the foundation of much of what I do. I’ve spent more than 30 years working across healthcare operations and RCM, from the front lines starting as an EMT in a clinical setting to executive leadership. As a Board-Certified Medical Practice Executive (CMPE) and Certified Professional Coder (CPC), I look at revenue cycle as much more than billing and collections. It begins before the patient ever walks through the door, with payer contracting and marketing, and extends through final reconciliation and adjudication of claims and data reporting. RCM sits at the intersection of operations, finance, technology, clinical workflows, and the patient experience. That perspective is also at the heart of my upcoming book, The Revenue Advantage: How Healthcare and Dental Leaders Stop Revenue Leakage and Protect the Margin, scheduled for release in Q4 2026.

Today, my role allows me to take decades of operational experience and help build the technology and strategies I wish I had when I was leading operations and RCM teams myself. But I also believe we need to expand the RCM conversation beyond the boardroom and the billing office. Through my podcast, The Hidden Pulse with Cissy, and my upcoming YouTube series, Walk with Cissy, I’m talking about dental and healthcare revenue cycle from both the business and patient points of view, because patients experience the consequences of these processes even when they have no idea what “revenue cycle” means. Whether I’m building technology, advising an organization, writing, podcasting, or talking directly to patients, the mission connects back to the same thing: understand where the system is breaking down, stop unnecessary revenue leakage, improve the experience, and turn revenue cycle into an advantage rather than simply a back-office function.

What do you think RCM will look like two years from now?

I think RCM will look much the same two years from now unless we change two things: behavior and how we use technology. In my experience across dental practices, medical practices, and hospital systems, roughly 90% of the denials we see are driven by internal processes and behaviors, while only about 10% are truly payer-inflicted – I have the data to back it up. We can continue adding technology, but if we automate a broken process, we simply create a faster broken process. The real transformation happens when organizations first change the behaviors and workflows creating the problems and then use technology and AI to eliminate unnecessary manual work. If we can do those two things in the next two years – and I know that is easier said than done – I believe we will see a significant shift in both the patient and provider experience, lower administrative costs, stronger financial performance, and ultimately better outcomes. When organizations protect their revenue and margin, they also have greater capacity to reinvest in their people, technology, equipment, and patient care.

I also believe the economics of health technology will begin to change. Technology itself should become less expensive and more accessible, while the real value, and investment, shifts toward the expertise behind how that technology is designed, implemented, and applied to solve real operational problems. AI will increasingly absorb repetitive manual processes, while experienced industry experts become even more important in determining what should be automated, how workflows should be redesigned, and how technology can produce the best possible outcome. At the same time, changes in healthcare data standards, including the continued evolution of X12 transactions and the richer data available through electronic remittance and claims processes, should give organizations better information to drive automation, billing accuracy, and clinical and administrative efficiency. That combination of better data, AI, redesigned processes, and true industry expertise has the potential to change RCM significantly, but technology alone will not transform the revenue cycle. People have to be willing to transform the way they work.