Blog - Axuall

Scaling New Heights: A Recap of Our 2026 Company Retreat

Posted on April 21, 2026April 22, 2026 by Madison Lander

As we reflect on Q1 of this year, we are reminiscing on our first official all-company retreat. February brought the Axuall team together under the desert sun for in-person workshops, team building, and fun! Set against the beautiful backdrop of Scottsdale, Arizona, we traded our home offices for a chance to reconnect, recalibrate, and gear up for the year ahead.

Our theme for the week was “Same Mission, New Altitude.” While our core purpose of empowering healthcare systems with real-time provider data remains steadfast, we are officially entering a new phase of growth. The retreat was designed to help us navigate that higher altitude together.

The vision: Same mission. New altitude.

We kicked off the week by reaffirming why we do what we do. The mission hasn’t changed, but the scale at which we operate has. We spent our sessions discussing how to maintain our agility and culture while building the systems needed to achieve this higher level of performance.

To drive profitability, you need to shrink the time-to-fill and the time-to-start windows. You need data that doesn’t just tell you who a doctor is, but whether they are a good fit based on practice patterns, ties to the area, and other-data driven traits. This leads to a more robust outbound strategy and ultimately finding the right candidate in a shorter amount of time.

Strategy and Collaboration

We rolled up our sleeves as a team for several breakout sessions focused on our core objectives. Senior leaders hosted sessions that shed light on what’s to come from a product innovation perspective, and individual teams shared their takes on what operational improvements we can make to achieve our goals.

Keynote speaker, David Sandler, led us in a workshop that tested our teamwork skills and creativity, encouraging us to think outside of the box to solve problems at work.

Team Bonding Off the Clock

When we weren’t in sessions, we were taking full advantage of everything Scottsdale has to offer.

Looking Ahead

We left Scottsdale feeling energized and empowered to make an impact this year. As we returned to our desks all over the country, we carried that “new altitude” mindset with us. We are more aligned than ever and ready to tackle the challenges of the healthcare workforce with renewed energy.

Thank you to everyone who made this retreat possible.

Want to join us for the next one? Check out our Careers Page to see how you can help us transform healthcare workforce intelligence.

Turn Provider Insights into Profit: How Axuall’s Premier Data Network Transforms Physician Recruiting

Posted on April 21, 2026April 21, 2026 by Madison Lander

In the high-stakes world of healthcare, the phrase “time is money” is not an exaggeration…it’s a clinical reality. When a physician vacancy sits open, the costs add up and compound over time. Between lost clinical revenue and increased burnout for remaining staff, a single open seat can drain a health system millions of dollars in potential revenue.

Yet, according to a recent Health Management Academy report, 80% of health system organizations are still approaching physician recruiting through archaic tools and processes, under-utilizing AI and automation. They rely on stale job boards, outdated CVs, and reactive strategies that ignore a large portion of the qualified market.

If you want to turn your recruitment department into a steady profitability engine, you have to stop searching and start targeting your outreach. The secret isn’t more recruiters, it’s superior, real-world data at the foundation of the search.

The Blind Spot in Traditional Physician Recruiting

Traditional physician recruiting is notoriously reactive. Recruiters wait around for leads or referrals to come in, they review the CVs, and the process goes on.

However, during that time, the “cost of vacancy” is hemorrhaging your bottom line.

The problem? Most recruiters lack visibility into a clinician’s actual practice patterns, their real-time availability, or their likelihood to move. They are chasing “active” candidates who are already being reached out to by many other systems, while the “passive” talent—the high-performers who aren’t looking but would move for the right fit—remains invisible.

Precision Sourcing With Axuall Explore

Axuall Explore changes the game. We’ve built the industry’s leading clinical workforce intelligence platform to eliminate the guesswork. Instead of sorting through digital stacks of unverified resumes, physician recruiting teams can now leverage AI-powered insights derived from over 30 billion claims data points and 19,000 primary sources.

With Explore, you aren’t just looking for a “Gastroenterologist.” You’re looking for a Gastroenterologist who:

Has a specific procedure volume that matches your facility’s needs.
Is currently affiliated with a competing system but has an “Open to Work” score indicating they might be ready for a conversation.
Possesses verified credentials that won’t get stuck in the credentialing bottleneck for three months.

By using Explore, recruiters can pinpoint “clinician phenotypes”—deep profiles that include care settings, patient demographics, and even a propensity for rural practice. This level of precision doesn’t just make your team faster, it makes them more effective. When you engage a candidate with a message that reflects their actual practice history, your response rates skyrocket. This allows your recruiters to spend more time doing what they’re good at: convincing those ideal candidates to walk through your doors.

Stop searching. Start hiring.

It’s clear that the old ways of physician recruiting are no longer just inefficient, they are a liability to the health system. To stay competitive and profitable, health systems must transition from manual, data-deficient processes to a strategy rooted in real-time workforce intelligence.

Axuall Explore provides the information you need to outpace the competition. It’s time to stop waiting for the right candidate to find you and start using the data to find them.

Ready to see how data-driven recruiting can impact the bottom line of your physician recruiting function?

Request a demo of Axuall Explore today and see the power of our Clinician Data Network in action.and see the power of our Clinician Data Network in action.

Request Demo

See Axuall This Spring: Where We’re Headed in April

Posted on March 30, 2026March 30, 2026 by Madison Lander

Spring is a busy season in healthcare — and the Axuall team will be on the road connecting with leaders and innovators who are shaping the future of healthcare workforce intelligence. Here’s where you can find us:

Becker's 16th Annual Meeting | April 13–16 | Chicago, IL

One of the most anticipated gatherings in healthcare, Becker’s Annual Meeting brings together more than 3,500 senior healthcare executives for four days of high-impact discussions. This year’s agenda tackles the industry’s most pressing challenges, from workforce sustainability and margin recovery to AI adoption. These are exactly the conversations Axuall was built for, and we’re excited to be a part of it.

If you’ll be in Chicago, we’d love to connect. Reach out to schedule time with our team here.

AAPPR Advancing Connections Annual Conference | April 13–15 | Orlando, FL

The AAPPR Annual Conference is the premier event for physician and provider recruitment professionals, and this year it’s taking place at the Walt Disney World Dophin Resort in Orlando, FL. The conference brings together recruitment leaders to explore strategies around sourcing hard-to-find talent, improving retention, and building workforce resilience in the face of ongoing provider shortages. These are the frontline challenges our platform is designed to address, and we’re looking forward to meaningful conversations with the people tackling them every day.

Stop by and see us at booth #407, or click here to book a meeting with our team. We’d love to show you what’s new at Axuall.

Inside the Clinician Wallet: How Axuall Cuts Credentialing Time and Improves Provider Satisfaction

Posted on March 18, 2026March 18, 2026 by Madison Lander

Credentialing can feel a lot like tax season.

Credentialing can feel a lot like tax season. Providers gather the same documents, enter the same information, and work through forms that look familiar but are never quite identical. This process repeats every time they join a new hospital, health system, or staffing organization. Work history, licenses, certification, affiliations. The same information gets entered again and again.

The impact goes beyond inconvenience. Each duplicate form and repeated verification adds time to the credentialing process, delaying start dates and frustrating both providers and credentialing teams. When provider data is scattered across systems and constantly recreated, organizations spend weeks chasing information that should already exist.

Every day, world-class surgeons and specialist providers spend hours manually entering the same personal data about themselves for the thousandth time. It’s an old way that costs health systems thousands in delayed starts and takes provider frustration to a new level.

What if credentialing didn’t feel like doing taxes every time a clinician joins a new organization? What if providers could carry their verified professional identity with them in a secure, portable, and continuously updated way?

That’s the design behind Axuall’s Clinician Wallet.

Say Goodbye to “Start Date” Delays

Manual credentialing can cause a ripple effect of delays when it comes to getting a clinician fully onboarded. When it takes 90 to 120 days to get a provider into the OR, the health system isn’t just losing money, patients are losing access as well.

The Clinician Wallet changes the math. By giving providers a digital home for their record—verified, real-time credentials that follow them wherever they go—we shift the burden from searching for data to simply confirming it.

Verified at the Source: No more “calling the university” for the tenth time
Real-Time Portability: Credentials move at the speed of a digital handshake
Instant Readiness: Shave off weeks of provider-onboarding timelines

Why “Confirm” is the Logic That Scales

If your health system is still manually verifying every primary source for every new hire, you aren’t scaling, you’re just hiring more people to keep up with the demand.

Axuall’s Confirm capability is the “no-brainer” for one simple reason: Trust shouldn’t have to be rebuilt from scratch every time a clinician moves. By utilizing a network of real-time data hooks, Axuall allows medical staff offices to stop acting like private investigators and start acting like strategic facilitators. It turns a bottleneck into a competitive advantage.

Finally a Strategic Way to Respecting the Clinician’s Time

According to a recent report by the Health Management Academy, rapid changes in clinician expectations are outpacing available data, highlighting the need for more real-time workforce intelligence. If you make a provider spend four hours on a credentialing packet, you are inadvertently telling them their time isn’t valuable.

The Clinician Wallet is a signal to your workforce. It says: “We respect your expertise enough to get the paperwork out of your way.” High provider satisfaction isn’t found in the systems that allow them to actually practice medicine.

The Bottom Line

The Clinician Wallet isn’t a “nice-to-have” digital file. It is the infrastructure for the modern healthcare workforce. Health systems using Axuall aren’t just faster, they’re more attractive places to work.

In a market where the competition for talent is fierce, can you really afford to keep ideal candidates waiting?

The Dirty Secret About Provider Data (That Everyone Knows and Nobody Owns)

Posted on March 10, 2026March 18, 2026 by Madison Lander

Jonathan Fullerton | Vice President, Strategic Growth, Axuall

Jonathan was employee number 50 at The Advisory Board Company, where he spent 16 years helping grow it from a healthcare research firm into a publicly traded, billion-dollar leader in research, business intelligence, consulting, and analytics, before launching a decade-long advisory practice for SaaS and healthcare innovators. Today he works with health system C-suites and founders to turn clinician data into the workforce intelligence layer behind patient access, referrals, and AI-enabled operations.

There’s a particular kind of madness only healthcare can pull off: an industry that runs on knowing exactly who its providers are, what they’re qualified to do, and where they’re doing it — and yet there’s no single source of truth on those same providers. There are accidental sources of truth – systems that evolved to serve credentialing, or sourcing, or revenue cycle – each one authoritative in its own silo and inconsistent everywhere else.

I say this with love. I’ve spent 30 years in this space. I am part of the problem.

We all are.

Here’s what nobody writes in thought leadership pieces about provider data: the challenge isn’t technical. It’s gravitational. Every health system has accumulated so many workarounds, manual processes, and “that’s just how we do it” rituals that the sheer mass of institutional habit bends everything toward the status quo. You could hand a CMIO a perfectly clean, verified, real-time provider record tomorrow morning and by Thursday it would be copy-pasted into a spreadsheet, emailed to someone in operations, and manually re-keyed into a system that was supposed to be decommissioned in 2021.

And whoever is doing that re-keying? They’re not the problem. The question is why we’ve built systems that need human duct tape in the first place, instead of freeing those people to do work that actually moves patients through the door.

Here’s the twist that is taking us too long to see: the provider data set is the most under-leveraged asset in healthcare.

We have spent billions on patient data infrastructure. EHRs, HIEs, interoperability mandates, FHIR standards — an entire ecosystem designed to make sure patient information flows where it needs to go. Meanwhile, the data about the people delivering the care lives in silos that are simply untenable in an AI-driven world.

Think about what a truly comprehensive, continuously verified provider record could unlock. Not just faster credentialing (though yes, absolutely that — cutting weeks off onboarding is worth real money and real market share). But imagine knowing, in real-time, the actual clinical activity profile of every provider in your network. Where they’re practicing. What procedures they’re performing. How their patient panel compares to peers. Whether they’re likely to leave in the next twelve months based on behavioral signals you never thought to look for.

The good news – and I realize I’ve been somewhat relentless about the bad news – is that the building blocks exist. Primary source verification networks that check thousands of sources in real time. Digital credentialing wallets that let clinicians “scan and confirm” their information instead of re-entering it for the forty-seventh time across their career. AI that can synthesize billions of encounter records into a picture of what a clinician actually does, not just what their CV says.

Organizations getting this right are changing what they can see. Sourcing candidates using real clinical activity data instead of job board guesswork. Feeding live provider intelligence into scheduling and referral systems that used to run on stale directory files. Predicting attrition before it shows up as a resignation letter. Faster credentialing with a radically improved provider experience.

The real shift is that provider data stops being a compliance file and starts being the strategic asset that is the necessary foundation to future health system success.

Next in this series: Your AI Strategy Has a Provider Data Problem (It Just Doesn’t Know It Yet) — What happens when you bolt artificial intelligence onto broken provider data? Coming next week.

Health Tech Solution Aimed at Identifying Clinicians Inclined to Work in Rural Communities

Posted on February 19, 2026February 20, 2026 by Madison Lander

Axuall Explore creates feature to fill some of the most difficult positions in healthcare.

Cleveland, OH, February 10, 2026 – Axuall, the industry leader in clinical workforce intelligence, announced a new feature to identify physicians and advanced practice providers who are more willing to work in rural communities. Using Axuall Explore, an AI-powered database of 1.5 million clinicians, health systems can now identify information to help recruit for some of their most difficult-to-fill positions. Analyzing clinician data from over 19,000 primary sources and more than 30 billion claims data points, Axuall Explore quickly identifies clinicians who have a propensity to work in rural areas.

Jason Junker, MA, CPRP, Corporate Director of Physician Recruitment, Multi-State Division at Advent Health, said this type of information will be invaluable in recruiting efforts. “With several markets recruiting physicians to serve rural communities, a tool like Axuall Explore is truly transformative. It helps us identify providers who are not only clinically strong but genuinely committed to rural practice—an audience that can be difficult to pinpoint. By connecting with these physicians through messaging that reflects our faith-based mission, we’re able to engage those whose calling aligns with our communities’ needs and ultimately strengthen the care we provide to our patients.”

The launch comes at an ideal time, as access to healthcare in rural communities has been a national focus. Currently:

- More than 91% of U.S. rural counties face healthcare workforce shortages.

- More than 16% of the U.S. population lives within a designated health professional shortage area.

Nearly 9,000 additional clinicians are needed to fill these gaps in care.

With just a few clicks through Axuall Explore, a physician recruiter can find more than 100,000 physicians and nearly 44,000 nurse practitioners who have practiced in a rural setting for at least three months.

“This level of precision leads directly to more efficient recruitment, superior workforce planning, and ultimately, the improved retention needed to stabilize care in these vital communities,” said Charlie Lougheed, the Co-founder and CEO of Axuall. “Solving the chronic staffing shortages in rural America is not just a challenge; it is a deepening crisis driven by funding cuts and the utter failure of conventional, broad-stroke recruitment strategies.”

The timing of this solution is even more crucial, considering the current rural healthcare workforce is nearing retirement age; the average age of physicians who work in a rural setting is 59 years old.

About Axuall

Built with leading healthcare systems, Axuall is a workforce intelligence company powered by a national, near real-time practitioner data network. The technology enables healthcare systems, staffing firms, telehealth, and health plans to dramatically reduce onboarding and enrollment time while also providing unique, powerful data insights for network planning, analytics, and reporting. To learn more, visit www.axuall.com.

Media Contact
Jeff Rusack
Media Relations Manager
KNB Communications
axuall@knbcomm.com

JPM Healthcare Conference 2026: Charlie Lougheed Shares Key Takeaways for Health Systems

Posted on January 20, 2026January 20, 2026 by Jessica Diederich

The era of the ‘bold growth’ narrative has come to a halt. At this year’s JP Morgan Healthcare Conference, the conversations weren’t filled with the usual topics of mergers and aggressive expansion. Instead, industry leaders reverted back to something much more demanding: stability and operational discipline.

Here are my top 5 takeaways from the event and what they signal for health system leaders who are willing to navigate and embrace these shifts.

1. Back to Basics: Stability Over Scale

The most consistent theme among non-profit health systems was a return to the fundamentals. There was a shift in focus from ambitious growth or mega-mergers to stability and consistency being the focal point. This shift reflects a convergence of pressures: roughly $1 trillion in projected Medicaid cuts over the coming decade, labor inflation, persistent claims denials, and regulatory uncertainty.

In this current environment, the message is clear: before pursuing what’s next, organizations must first stabilize what they have to maintain profitability and demonstrate financial resiliency to bond investors.

2. Workforce Optimization Needs Workforce Intelligence

Another key theme indicated that workforce challenges remain front and center, but the conversation is changing. While nursing shortages and contingent labor costs are still major concerts, leaders also discussed recruitment and retention across physicians and advanced practice providers.

What really stood out was the increasing use of data and AI to drive smarter workforce decisions validating our most recent solution release, Axuall Sync.

3. Integration as a Value Driver

For health systems that have recently merged or are pursuing internal consolidation, integration was a central narrative for demonstrating value creation.

This went beyond their own assets, as Jeff Flaks, CEO Hartford HealthCare, emphasized a care-delivery partnership across the ecosystem. Many leaders emphasized “nontraditional partnerships” to embrace this theme including:

One Medical (20 primary care centers)
K Health for virtual primary care
Uber for patient transportation
Google for its AI platforms

4. Ambulatory Expansion and Portfolio Optimization

Another clear theme was the aggressive expansion of ambulatory footprints within non-profit health systems. These systems are actively divesting underperforming assets and focusing on convenient, community-based care based on customer preferences and the opportunity to optimize capital allocation.

5. Revenue Cycle Resiliency and Denial Management

Finally, with margin pressures intensifying, health systems placed significant emphasis on revenue cycle management and claims denial reduction as critical operational priorities. Leaders spoke openly about the impact of improving revenue cycle resiliency and the importance of protecting margins without compromising care.

Ultimately, the era of ‘growth at all costs’ is over, and we have officially entered the era of operational accountability. The takeaway from JPM is clear: the industry is no longer rewarding size, it is rewarding the discipline to execute. While others are distracted by the noise, the healthcare leaders who will win in 2026 are those ruthlessly optimizing their most valuable asset: their workforce.

At Axuall, we aren’t just sitting back and watching this shift, we are providing the real world data and intelligence required to lead it. The question for leaders now isn’t how big you can get, but how smart you can move.

Leveraging Advanced Analytics and AI Tools to Derive Actionable Insights from Complex Healthcare Datasets

Posted on December 4, 2025December 4, 2025 by Jessica Diederich

Axuall CEO Charlie Lougheed shares how advanced analytics and AI are transforming complex healthcare data into trusted, real-time intelligence that drives better decisions across the care continuum. In a new Healthcare IT Today article, he underscores why health systems need connected, high-quality workforce and clinical data to unlock meaningful, actionable insights and more sustainable performance.

Read the full story and Charlie’s perspective on the future of healthcare analytics here.

A Perfect Storm is Brewing Within the U.S. Healthcare Workforce: Public Policy, Data, and AI Will Help Us Weather It

Posted on November 20, 2025November 20, 2025 by Jessica Diederich

A new MedCity News article by Axuall CEO and co-founder Charlie Lougheed explores how a “perfect storm” of physician, APP, and nursing shortages is straining the U.S. healthcare workforce—and why traditional fixes are no longer enough. Lougheed outlines how forward-looking health systems can combine smart public policy with provider data and AI to better forecast staffing needs, expand candidate pools, streamline onboarding, and optimize physician-to-APP ratios, enabling care teams to keep pace with rising patient demand.

Click here to read the full article.

Purpose Jobs Recognizes Axuall as a Top Tech Company to Watch in Ohio for 2026

Posted on November 5, 2025November 5, 2025 by Jessica Diederich

Axuall has been recognized as one of Purpose Jobs’ Top Tech Companies in Ohio to Watch in 2026, highlighting the company’s exceptional innovation and growth in the healthcare technology sector.

Featured among leading tech organizations in Cleveland, Axuall stands out for helping to solve one of healthcare’s biggest challenges: the clinician workforce shortage. Purpose Jobs cited Axuall’s vast clinician data network, advanced clinician phenotypes, and data integration capabilities as essential tools in helping to streamline and expedite the recruiting, onboarding, and credentialing process for providers and healthcare organizations.

This latest recognition by Purpose Jobs is a testament to Axuall’s commitment to driving meaningful change in healthcare and positioning Ohio as a center for tech innovation—and we’re just getting started!