Now, Near, Far—a Conversation With Diane Maas of Beacon Health System

Diane Maas is the chief strategy and digital transformation officer of Beacon Health System, based in South Bend, Indiana.

Q: Let’s start by learning more about you—what’s your background and what brought you to your current role at Beacon Health?

I wrote my thesis in college on the HMO industry, which led to my first job in health care, working for Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan. I absolutely loved everything about it, but I was also fascinated by the provider side, and so I went back to school for my master's degree at the University of Notre Dame and met a lot of people from our local health systems there. The capstone class for the program was focused on strategy and made me realize that’s what I want to do in the future.

After graduating, I had the chance to join Beacon and start its managed care department. Over the last 35 years, I’ve advanced through the organization into the chief strategy and digital transformation officer role. I would say a lot of that career progression was based on executing on business development projects that led to growth in the organization. Beyond managed care, I’ve overseen various business areas over the years, including value-based care coordination and pop health initiatives, market research, marketing and digital communications, managing outpatient locations and developing a couple of small acute hospitals.

My niche has centered on business development, smart growth (including M&A and joint ventures) and consumer-driven culture, because without consumer-driven culture you won’t see growth in an organization. Linking strategy with those areas has driven most of my career.

Q: Regarding Beacon’s organizational approach to digital transformation, how do you balance leveraging technology to keep up with the competitive market versus leveraging it to create true differentiation? We’ve seen spaces like telehealth (and arguably AI) where technology becomes commoditized fairly quickly.

I’ll give you an example. Post-pandemic, we were leading the market by investing in digital front door tools with our online scheduling, digital intake, etc. As those functions became more table stakes, we thought more intentionally about how to use those tools to create a personalized, frictionless and seamless consumer experience. That has become our vision—to provide care when and where people want it in a way that optimizes both access and the experience. We can put a great online scheduling technology out there, but if it’s not improving the overall experience, it’s not delivering value.

One of the things I'm most proud of this year is how we worked with one of our newer vendors, Notable, to support the outbound experience for people when they need orders-based scheduling. For example, you go to your doctor's office, and they say you need a CT or an MRI. Well, people could wait weeks before it gets scheduled and preauthorized. Today, from the time the order goes into the system, we drop a text to the patient telling them that their doctor has put an order in and then, because it's linked to our system, they can go in and directly schedule the MRI or CT they need. We now have about 60% of our patients clicking on those links and scheduling, helping us reduce the number of days it takes to schedule. Most people are doing it within 24 hours of outreach, so that's a huge patient satisfier.

Q: Going deeper on some of the consumer-driven trends that you're focused on, have you found any other interesting shifts in digitally enabled consumer behavior post-pandemic?

Metrics are always changing. I would say our online appointment scheduling is definitely seeing an uptick because today it's all about convenience. Digital intake that allows patients to check in remotely has also become popular as patients don’t have to wait in line when they get to an office. Urgent cares are busy, and we have an online “save my spot” feature for those sites that takes about 45% of our patients off the wait list. Then, there are other digital tools we use to support bill payment and other post-visit needs. The telehealth space is interesting because many of the payers in Indiana have their own telehealth options now. I think virtual visits are shifting to the payer side because there are no copays if patients go that route. We also provide telehealth options for our patients.

All these trends have common goals around immediate access and convenience. People are just looking to save time, so anything we can do to help with that, we've embraced and rolled out.

Q: Let’s pivot to talk about AI. What are some of the top areas of focus for Beacon Health these days?

I put our AI initiatives in three buckets: clinical care, revenue cycle and the consumer front door.

Looking at clinical first, ambient documentation has definitely transformed the providers’ workday. We did a pilot program a couple of years ago and have since rolled that out to almost every specialty. We’re finding the quality of their notes is increasing and docs are reporting less “pajama time” and higher job satisfaction. There are also some cases where we’re seeing physicians fit in one or two more appointments in a day because they're not spending all that time charting. So that's something we've spent a lot of time on. There are also more traditional AI use cases in clinical areas like radiology.

On the revenue cycle side, we’re dealing with the “battle of the bots” with the insurance companies. We have added so many people over the last 10 years just to handle the denials and pre-certs and all of the requests that come from the payers. About four years ago, we ended up developing a lot of the bot communication with payers to smooth some of that out, leading to dramatic improvements in our account receivables and denial rates. I think that's just going to continue to escalate next year as we start to roll out more functions around preauthorization/precertification processes.

And then on the consumer front door, that is tied to the work we’re doing with Notable. One new area we’ll be tracking for 2026 is the development of an intelligent contact center, which will start to incorporate agentic AI capabilities. We're also participating in an agentic AI collaborative to learn more about the possibilities with other health systems.

Q: You talked about payers using AI, which is an area I know many health system stakeholders are nervous about, but they’re also exploring how to leverage AI for areas like managed care contracting and value-based care design. Given your work experience, do you see potential for AI-enhanced payer strategy workflows?

I do. This reminds me of a demo I saw of a potential application about two years ago at a National Institute for Healthcare Leadership event where they developed a tool and fed it contracts and all of the payer manuals. That way, you could link those payer manuals with the revenue cycle to help determine where there was a denial. Doing that work manually is too difficult, so, having all of that information linked into the revenue system where an AI can help redline new payer manuals that come out against the old ones, and seeing if there's anything you need to go back to negotiate—that has a ton of potential. The big thing is you want to see the payer policies as they change related to contract terms and the yield on the contract, and a lot of value comes from just supporting contract modeling because it's so complex.

Q: Speaking of complex, what is the biggest hurdle that your organization is currently facing when it comes to your digital initiatives?

Change management is something that is underestimated as part of the process. We can roll something out and two months later go back and check the offices and see it’s not being used. So, the challenge is deploying a digital initiative the right way to ensure operational adoption for the long term. Part of that is conveying that for some of these initiatives, it’s no longer a choice, it's a necessity. Not in every area, but in workflows that are repetitive or easy to automate, all of that needs to be pushed to self-service. Other industries have gotten there, but in many cases health care hasn't. And consumers are ready for it—they prefer the digital tools and satisfaction ratings are very high when they use them.

Q: Managing change and getting the workforce to see the bigger picture is certainly a challenge, especially when it comes to overcoming daily challenges. Given your role, how do you balance long-term strategic planning with near-term operational pressures?

It's hard. We follow a strategic planning framework called “Now, Near, Far,” which tracks initiatives in increments of zero-to-three years, three-to-five years and then five-plus years. Most of our incentive metrics for the organization are focused on the “now,” but this year we also had to select another metric that would get us to our vision of the “far.” For consumer-driven culture, that was that intelligent contact center, which is not something you spin up right away—it takes a significant investment and a journey to get there. But if we're not starting it today, it won't be done in the future.

The way we manage is through quarterly results reviews and quarterly goals. And so, as a leader, you have to hit your goals on all of those. While it's easy to get stuck in determining what do I have to do today, if you're not hitting those metrics for the future too, your scorecard's going to be red or yellow, and that gets reported up to our executive management and board. So, this structure keeps a nice mix of focus on today's world but also getting ready for the future.

If what we're doing today won't get us to our vision of the “far,” we're not being aggressive enough. And so even with the Ascension Southwest Michigan acquisition that we had earlier this year, which required all hands on deck for many months, we still had to hit our other goals. Nobody said let's just put those on the backburner for this year.

Q: We are now approaching 2026 and you’ve touched on some of the goals for the coming year. What else is on the road map for Beacon Health next year?

For the first quarter, a big priority will be to expand the ambient AI workflow for our nursing staff. We're currently a beta site with Oracle Health and plan on rolling that out in 2026. That’s an area we feel from a clinical perspective needs to happen. We’ll also continue launching digital products and consolidating our EHR across new sites coming from the acquisition. I'm also finalizing a plan for the next two years around all the automation projects Beacon can do (eg, prior auth, quality gaps, outbound digital phone calls). There will be a bigger focus on really pushing for that automation within our road map.

This blog post is part of an ongoing Q&A series with digital health leaders at organizations across the US. These in-depth interviews aim to provide real-world perspective and insights in this rapidly evolving space. Don’t miss the other blogs in the series, found here.

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