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Ada Guidotti Finkel found her purpose in healthcare. While now the general counsel at Access Healthcare Services USA (AHS), she once thought she would work more directly in technology and business. She worked at a software company helping clients harness the power of tech to improve efficiency. Some of those clients were hospitals and health systems. Then, someone in Finkel’s family experienced a severe health issue, and she found that navigating the complexities of healthcare suddenly became more personal.
At the time, Finkel worked at Perot Systems, which H. Ross Perot founded, and a renowned IT services firm known for its proficiency in outsourced data centers and other tech components in the healthcare and government sectors. An interest in technology drove her to the space, but she found that the source of her motivation started shifting to something else. “I started to understand better how decisions around healthcare services are provided and paid for really impact individual people, and I realized even I had important contributions to make,” she explains.
The veteran lawyer has a combined focus on technology and business processes. She studied business administration at Sonoma State University, later attended law school, and completed an MBA at Boston’s Suffolk University. As Finkel amassed big law and in-house experience, she cultivated her practice mainly representing complex services and outsourcing vendors, where leaders in industries like healthcare outsourced a variety of tech components that they either didn’t have the capacity or expertise to support.
“I started to understand better how decisions around healthcare services are provided and paid for really impact individuals, and I realized I had important contributions I could make.”
Ada Guidotti Finkel
Although she’s been with Access since 2021, Finkel’s roots run deep there: the company was started in 2011 by some former Perot Systems leaders. Today, Access has built itself into a prominent revenue cycle solutions provider that over 150 healthcare institutions trust to make their operations more efficient to focus on what they do best. This happens as the technicians and engineers Finkel represents develop new methods to optimize all aspects of medical coding, billing, payments, and collections processes. Access also provides member enrollment and engagement, claims administration, and more.
The robust platform covers 80 medical specialties, supports over 500,000 physicians, and processes over 400 million annual transactions. The 27,000-plus employees—and 3,500 virtual bots—work in eighteen global services centers across India, the Philippines, and the United States.
Ada Guidotti Finkel oversees all things legal as general counsel. When it comes to outsourced services, she and her team continually evaluate how to enable Access best to utilize tech tools and cutting-edge systems alongside the vast employee base to deliver best-in-class services.
As pandemics and politics continue to reshape healthcare, Finkel notes that health administrators continue to outsource more than just tech services. They also call upon vendors to handle call centers, claims management, fee collection, and other tasks better managed by experts aware of the regulatory changes and updates in compliance rules. “My team and our colleagues can remove the arduous administrative work and free providers up to get back to the work of being doctors and nurses,” Finkel explains.
“My team and our colleagues can remove the arduous administrative work and free providers up to get back to the work of being doctors and nurses.”
Ada Guidotti Finkel
She finds meaning in performing her role well at Access and looks for every opportunity to support them to improve how the company provides its services. Finkel recalls early in her career negotiating agreements with a hospital that insisted on the necessity of receiving timestamp information down to the hundredth of a second before it was industry standard. Why? Because the impact of medication that isn’t administered in a timely can have a catastrophic effect.
As Ada Guidotti Finkel continues to support similar deals, she looks for these and other imperative details in every agreement because she knows that every element matters to a patient. “Everyone involved in the industry matters, and we need the contribution of each person along the spectrum of healthcare to get the best chance for each patient,” she says. “Only when those contributions come together does the patient receive the best possible experience and outcome.”
As Access continues to optimize and expand its services, the company is deepening its expertise in robotics automation and artificial intelligence to keep up with the changing landscape. “We’re not only trying to improve how things have always been done, but we’re also looking to discover how we can do things that are brand new,” Ada Guidotti Finkel says, adding that the freedom to pursue innovation keeps her, those she leads, and everyone at Access engaged in their work.
Together, they fulfill the company’s purpose to “be the most respected healthcare business process and IT services team in the world.”
