How to Automate Lockbox EOBs and Deposits

When Aaron Smith sat down with Amanda Brummit on Episode 76 of the WeInfuse podcast, the conversation quickly moved past introductions and into the problem that keeps infusion center operators up at night: getting paid.

Not the clinical side of things—Aaron is quick to point out that clinical care isn't what's broken in infusion. It's the complexity of back-office operations, the gaps between systems, and the manual processes that create risk where no one is looking. The lockbox is a prime example.

From FlexCare to Vetriq: Building Solutions for Infusion Centers

Aaron's path to founding Vetriq started with 25 years in healthcare technology. His first software company was acquired by Halcyon in 2013. The more recent venture—FlexCare—was founded with Cali Turk in 2019 and eventually sold to Optum.

The FlexCare origin story is personal. A family member with Crohn's disease was referred for infusion therapy, and the intake process was a wake-up call. Multiple providers, authorization challenges, and a system that seemed designed to create barriers rather than remove them. At the time, Aaron was working at Optum Infusion, which gave him a front-row seat to the industry's operational challenges—and access to smart people thinking about how to do it better. Cali Turk was one of them.

"Clinical care is not the problem in the infusion industry. It is the complexity at the back office that is the problem."

Together, they built FlexCare with a clear thesis: if they could solve the operational complexity, clinical care would take care of itself. The WeInfuse platform was central to that effort from day one—Aaron credits Reese and the WeInfuse team with helping them build the clinic, figure out processes, and get the operation running.

The Lockbox Problem: Why Revenue Cycle Teams Are Struggling

The biggest challenge in infusion isn't a clinical one. It's getting paid—consistently, on time, and in a way you can measure and trust. And within that challenge, lockbox management is one of the most overlooked pain points.

At FlexCare, Aaron discovered that six people were managing six lockboxes. Those lockboxes handled roughly 10% of the organization's correspondence. The team members responsible weren't full-time lockbox staff—it was one of 15 things on their plate, which meant it was often an afterthought.

"That's 10% of infusion dollars going through something that is a complete black box."

The consequences of that lack of visibility are severe in infusion, where drug costs are high and margins are thin. A denial that goes undetected for 20 days. A check that gets routed to the wrong entity. A payment that shows up in the lockbox but never makes it into the practice management system. Each one of these is a small miss that creates an outsized financial problem.

The situation gets even more complicated for MSOs (Management Services Organizations) managing infusion for physician practices. When payers send remittance advice to the physician rather than the infusion group, you don't just have a transparency problem—you have a political one. You're chasing information across organizational lines, and the question isn't even "did we get paid?" It's "do we even know if we're going to get paid?"

How Vetriq Makes the Lockbox Not the Black Box

Vetriq was built to solve a specific problem: the gap between your banking system, your practice management system, and your revenue cycle platform. Paper checks arrive at the lockbox. EOBs explain what was paid. But getting that data from the bank into your revenue cycle system—accurately, completely, and in real time—has traditionally required manual work.

Vetriq automates that entire chain. For every paper check that hits the lockbox, Vetriq identifies it, processes the corresponding EOB, and creates a posting-ready document that integrates directly into your revenue cycle system. The result: your paper checks and EOBs are reconciled inside the system where the rest of your financial data already lives—with enterprise-grade security at every step.

"We are completely independent so that we can work with anybody—any EHR, any bank—so that we can tie the systems together."

Critically, Vetriq works with any EHR and any bank. There's no migration required, no system change. As Aaron put it on the podcast: Vetriq doesn't replace your RCM system, your bank, or your lockbox. It connects them so the manual work between them disappears.

For MSOs dealing with split entities, Vetriq can serve both the physician and the infusion group—pulling apart medical services and drug costs, routing information to both parties in real time, and ensuring nothing falls through the cracks.

Automation Over Analytics: Solving Problems, Not Just Finding Them

One of the more candid moments in the conversation was Aaron's take on analytics versus automation. After years of investing in analytics at FlexCare and Optum, he's come to a blunt conclusion: analytics alone add more work.

"The problem with analytics is it just brings more work and it doesn't necessarily help take the work away."

Identifying a problem is half the battle, but it doesn't relieve an already overworked team of the tasks piling up every day. If you surface 50 issues but your team can only handle the top 10, the other 40 sit there—known but unresolved.

The shift Aaron sees with agentic AI and modern automation is the ability to not just identify a problem but send an agent to resolve it. Instead of presenting a team with more work, you present them with a solved problem. Or at minimum, you automate the repetitive manual steps so the team only handles true exceptions.

In the case of lockbox processing, Vetriq's approach removes 100% of the manual work—not 50% with a human in the loop, but the full chain from paper to posting.

What's Next for Vetriq

The lockbox is just the starting point. Aaron described an "entire chain through the revenue cycle" with gaps that technology can fill—underpayments, denial detection, correspondence routing, and reconciliation across multiple systems and entities. Each one is a place where data breaks down, time is lost, and errors compound.

Vetriq's newest partnership is with WeInfuse, bringing lockbox automation directly into the WeInfuse ecosystem. For infusion centers already running on the WeInfuse platform, the integration means paper check data flows into the same system where electronic payments, scheduling, and clinical data already live.

Aaron's parting advice to infusion center operators was characteristically direct:

"Automate the boring parts. That's where all your risk lives. That's where all your problems are being created. Just because they're boring doesn't mean they aren't big. And mostly whenever they're boring, they're pretty easily fixable."