When you find revenue leakage in a healthcare practice, do you focus on recovering the money—or figuring out why it leaked in the first place?

I’ve been thinking about this distinction more lately. An unpaid claim, denial, underpayment, missed charge, or uncollected balance is obviously something that needs to be worked. But it’s also evidence that something somewhere in the revenue system may have failed.

If you recover the money but don’t correct the underlying process, accountability, information gap, or control, aren’t you essentially waiting for the same problem to happen again?

For those who manage practices or revenue cycle: when you identify revenue leakage, how far upstream do you go to find the actual cause?