SIFT HEALTHCARE ANNOUNCES PARTNERSHIP WITH HARTFORD HEALTHCARE TO APPLY AI AND ADVANCED ANALYTICS TO REDUCE REIMBURSEMENT RISK

Strategic partnership focuses on preventing denials and other adverse payment outcomes earlier in the revenue cycle.

MILWAUKEE and HARTFORD, Conn., Feb. 11, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Sift Healthcare, a healthcare payments intelligence company leveraging data science and AI to improve healthcare reimbursement and revenue cycle performance, has announced a strategic partnership with Hartford HealthCare, one of the nation's leading integrated health systems.

The joint effort will bring together clinical, coding, authorization, and payment data to identify actionable opportunities to reduce denials and other adverse payment outcomes, improve coding accuracy, and better align authorization and documentation workflows across the revenue cycle, with an emphasis on earlier points in care delivery and documentation where payment risk often originates.

Rather than relying solely on retrospective denials management, the initiative will focus on upstream drivers such as preservice authorization, concurrent level-of-care decisions, and clinical documentation, areas that can materially influence reimbursement outcomes before a claim is submitted.

 "Reimbursement pressure is increasingly shaped upstream, long before a claim is submitted," said Cynthia Pugliese, Hartford HealthCare's Senior Vice President of Revenue Cycle Services. As part of the collaboration, Sift will work closely with targeting opportunities across utilization management, clinical documentation improvement, coding, and patient financial services, surfacing insights from both structured and unstructured data. These insights will inform the design of workflow-integrated interventions intended to prevent denials, reduce downstream rework, and improve payment accuracy.

"This partnership enables us to apply advanced AI in a disciplined, workflow-driven way, helping our clinical and operational teams identify practical opportunities to improve how care is documented, authorized, and reimbursed, aligned with the HHC's Center for AI Innovation in Healthcare said Barry Stein, MD, HHC's Chief Innovation Officer and leader of the Center for AI Innovation in Healthcare.

"Payers are applying increasingly sophisticated analytics to reimbursement decisions, and health systems need equally sophisticated tools to understand and respond to that shift," said Justin Nicols, Founder and CEO of Sift Healthcare. "Hartford HealthCare is a leader in approaching this challenge thoughtfully, focusing on earlier points in the care and documentation process where payment risk often originates. This partnership reflects our shared belief that preventing adverse payment outcomes requires deep clinical context, longitudinal payment intelligence, and insights that translate into action inside real workflows."

The partnership builds on Sift's RevProtect platform, which unifies clinical and financial data to create a longitudinal view of payer behavior and payment outcomes. By pairing that foundation with Hartford HealthCare's operational expertise, the organizations aim to validate approaches to denial prevention, authorization alignment, and coding accuracy that can be scaled across complex health system environments.

About Hartford HealthCare
With 48,000 dedicated colleagues and a bold vision for the future, Hartford HealthCare is transforming healthcare across Connecticut and beyond—enhancing access, affordability, health equity, and excellence. Spanning more than 500 locations across 185 towns and cities, our comprehensive care-delivery system is built to serve every community, every day.

From world-class hospitals—including two tertiary-level teaching hospitals, an acute-care community teaching hospital, an acute-care hospital and trauma center, and four community hospitals—to an expansive network of behavioral health services, multispecialty physician groups, urgent and virtual care, surgery centers, home care, senior care, rehabilitation, and mobile neighborhood health programs, Hartford HealthCare is there when and where it matters most.

We touch the lives of nearly 28,000 people every single day, delivering unparalleled care through our unique Institute Model—bringing together leading experts in neuroscience, cancer, digestive health, heart and vascular care, orthopedics, and urology & kidney health to provide a unified, high standard of care at the most affordable cost.

Recognized nationally for patient safety and clinical excellence, Hartford HealthCare boasts Leapfrog A-ratings across all our hospitals—making us one of the safest healthcare systems in the country.

Join us on our journey to reimagine healthcare. Visit www.HartfordHealthCare.org and stay connected through our newsletters and social media.

About Sift Healthcare
Sift Healthcare is a healthcare payments intelligence company focused on helping health systems better understand and manage reimbursement complexity. Sift's RevProtect platform brings together clinical, authorization, coding, and payment data to deliver actionable insights that support denial prevention, payment accuracy, and revenue cycle optimization. Sift works with healthcare organizations to apply advanced analytics and AI in ways that are grounded in real-world clinical and operational workflows.

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SOURCE Sift Healthcare