At Eleos, we’re proud to build technology purpose-built for community-based care. But what sets our team apart is the lived experience behind the product—the former clinicians, administrators and revenue cycle leaders who have walked in your shoes.
In this Q&A, GiYe Filipowicz, Customer Insights Manager, Revenue Cycle, explains how she went from managing complex RCM operations on the provider side to building tools that give teams their time back. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
What initially drew you to healthcare, and what keeps you grounded in this work?
When I was in high school, I experienced two traumatic events that really shaped what I decided to do with my life and my career.
In 2001, my mom was shot and became paralyzed. Shortly after that, my dad passed away from lung cancer. Going through those experiences made me want to pursue a career in the healthcare industry, because it’s a big deal to me to make sure that people are taken care of. I treat every person I interact with as a member of my family.
I love supporting the nonprofit space, especially because I’ve seen and experienced how race and socioeconomic factors impact access to care. A lot of the people we’re helping really have to make a choice: Do I want to go to my behavioral health appointment, or do I want enough money to make dinner for my family? My mission has always been to make both of those things possible.
At the end of the day, most people get into this business to help others, not to worry about documentation and typing up notes. So, I came to Eleos to make that type of impact on a bigger scale.
Before coming to Eleos, you spent several years as Director of Revenue Cycle at Trilogy, a nonprofit CMHC in Chicago. What did that operational side of the mission actually look like on the ground?
My typical day involved running reports to track payer issues and benchmark our performance. I would look at rejected and denied batches, review trends, and then split up the work across my team so we could address them all.
But we were a small team handling 13+ locations processing millions of dollars in revenue. It was just me, one biller, two collectors, two people handling authorizations and one person in credentialing. The administrative burden that RCM teams face is outrageous, and sometimes there was just too much work to handle.
Part of the challenge is that EHRs aren’t built for everyone—they either favor clinical staff or RCM staff. So, we’d get paper EOBs around 60 days after sending a claim, but there was nothing in the system to separate denials from what was pending.
So, what do you do? You build a workaround, and you keep doing things the way you’ve been doing them. And it’ll work for a while. But over time, you keep piling new workarounds on top of old workarounds until everything just falls apart.
It sounds like you were living through the worst parts of legacy health tech every day. I’d imagine most people in that position just try to survive. Why leave the provider side to go work for a tech vendor?
To fix it! To make it better! Our industry is changing rapidly, and if we don’t catch up, we are going to fail all the people who need our help.
I also saw an opportunity to make a difference after reconnecting with a former Trilogy colleague who had joined Eleos. She told me how she was helping to design product features, and she explained what the product was for. At the time, Trilogy was actually using Eleos on the clinical side for documentation. Being on the RCM side, I had no idea. Clinical and revenue teams didn’t really talk to each other, which is pretty common in behavioral health.
But immediately, I’m thinking, Why isn’t anyone building tools like that for RCM? It would help us so much with denials. I wanted to go somewhere where I could fix that side of the house.
That hands-on RCM background clearly gives you a unique perspective. How does it shape what you’re building now?
I’ve been on the other side. I know what it’s like. I’ve seen what it means to have people so busy dealing with administrative burdens, they don’t have time to do the jobs they were hired for.
When I was running RCM, eligibility was the one thing that forced everyone to stop what they were doing and jump in. We had a massive spreadsheet to track the work, and we had eight people logging into portals just to verify payers. That process alone took 2-3 weeks. The authorizations team then needed another week or two just to update the EHR.
I started researching technologies that could help us, but most of it was for big hospitals dealing with commercial payers. Trilogy is a nonprofit CMHC—most of its population is Medicaid—so that wasn’t going to work for us.
So, when I came to Eleos, fixing that was my personal mission. We’re building eligibility automation specifically designed for behavioral health and Medicaid workflows, so RCM teams don’t have to spend all their time digging through portals. If my team had that at Trilogy, it would have given them weeks of their lives back every month to focus on the work they were actually hired to do.
It’s easier to see that value when you’re building the product. But bringing in new technology creates friction, and healthcare is notoriously hesitant to change. How do you respond to organizations that are reluctant to adopt new tools?
You have to adapt when it comes to technology. Years ago, when electronic claims first came around, everyone was saying, “I can’t do this electronically.” But if you didn’t make that shift proactively, you eventually had to catch up—otherwise, you weren’t getting paid on time.
The same thing is happening right now with revenue cycle. If you think for one second that insurance companies aren’t leveraging AI to audit claims, you’re mistaken. They use technology to protect their bottom line every day. Providers have to do the same.
But it’s not just about having the right tools. It’s also about having the right mentality. Before things fall apart, a good leader will stop, recognize their team is overwhelmed, and search for a better way to operate. That mentality shift is especially important right now with H.R.1 and Medicaid policy changes taking effect in 2027. We have to get in front of these shifts fast, or risk the patients we serve not getting the help they need.
You’ve talked a lot about how relentless this work is on the ground. Taking a step back from the spreadsheets and payer rules, what has this career taught you about the human side of leadership?
I get emotional talking about it. When I worked on the provider side, I literally put myself in the hospital with a heart issue and high blood pressure because I was working so many hours, just trying to figure out how to make these broken processes work. That’s the reality for so many people in this field, because we really, truly care about supporting people who are going through the hardest moments of their lives.
Being in this role has proven to me that you can’t lead people if you don’t treat them as human beings first. When you can’t be who you truly are, it stops you from doing the best job, because it changes the way you look at the job. I’m a Black and Korean woman with long nails, lashes, and braids in my hair. It took me a long time to realize that I don’t have to change who I am to be in this industry, because my knowledge speaks for itself.
When you show your team that you care about them as human beings, it makes them care about the mission. And that’s what it’s all about, right? It’s about taking care of people—taking administrative weight off their shoulders—so they can give that time back to their patients, their kids, and their lives.
GiYe Filipowicz is a Customer Insights Manager, Revenue Cycle at Eleos Health. Before joining Eleos, she was Director of Revenue Cycle at Trilogy, where she led billing, collections, authorizations and credentialing across 13+ clinic locations. Her frontline experience shapes the product vision and roadmap at Eleos, enabling us to build solutions that solve longstanding operational challenges for CCBHCs, CMHCs, and other community-based care organizations.
