Founder of RebateRight | Product Management | Healthcare | Radiology
The Burden of Invisible Rules
Medicare regulations shift every quarter. They carry hundreds of layered conditions regarding age restrictions, frequency limits, and referring provider eligibility. Yet the software systems tasked with enforcing these rules rarely adapt at the same pace. This leaves front-desk staff and billing teams to memorize criteria they can barely access. The result is a cycle of rejected claims, unpaid work, and frustrated patients.
A Career Spent Closing the Gap
Elizabeth Loughlin spent fifteen years watching that exact cycle play out inside clinical environments. Today, she is the Co-Founder of RebateRight, a health technology platform that automates Medicare eligibility checks for Australian healthcare providers. Her entire career is defined by a single, unyielding conviction: complexity belongs inside the software, never on the shoulders of the person doing the work.
Learning the Floor Before Building the Code
Long before she designed enterprise software, Elizabeth Loughlin managed the reality of clinical operations. She spent nearly a decade at Castlereagh Imaging, overseeing client services, clinical trials, and radiology information systems. She sat between clinical teams, billing departments, and IT. She saw firsthand what happens when a system is technically functional but lacks the billing intelligence to support the staff at a busy reception desk or on the end of a patient call.
That operational grounding shaped her move into product management. At Sonic Healthcare, she spent years leading a portfolio of radiology applications. She directed the development of enterprise tools used by radiologists, patients, and administrative staff across complex environments. Her mandate was continuous delivery. She had to ship fast while protecting clinical safety and operational trust.
She learned that releasing software in a highly regulated environment requires balancing technical constraints with actual user needs. A system could pass every engineering test and still fail on the clinic floor if it added friction to a patient interaction. She realized the industry needed tools built specifically to absorb administrative friction.
When she co-founded RebateRight in 2024, she was building the platform, onboarding clients and working through a formal Information Technology diploma. She already possessed the operational and clinical expertise. She wanted the underlying technical vocabulary to match it. That dual perspective allowed her to bridge the gap between engineering rigor and clinical reality, ensuring her product solved the actual problems she had spent years observing.
Replacing Guesswork With Real-Time Confidence
RebateRight exists to eliminate the guesswork from Medicare billing. The platform instantly checks more than 300 Medicare rules. It evaluates referring provider rules, same-day test restrictions, and in-hospital criteria before a patient ever walks into an examination room.
The scale of the problem becomes clear in the results. To date, the platform has prevented more than $25 million in claim rejections. It has saved clinics over 60,000 hours of manual rework. But the real value happens in quiet moments at the front desk.
“The underlying belief: complexity should be absorbed by the system, not pushed onto the person doing the work,” Elizabeth Loughlin explains. “If the admin and billing teams need specialist training to do their job correctly, the system has failed them, not the other way around.”
That philosophy drives every feature. When a system simply outputs a basic approval or denial on an eligibility check, it leaves the user blind to the reasoning. A rejected claim without context is just another administrative burden.
“Simplifying without oversimplifying means never hiding the ‘why,'” she says. “Every output has to carry its logic in a way that makes sense to the user.”
Consider a recent patient booking an MRI scan. The procedure typically costs several hundred dollars out of pocket without a Medicare rebate. This specific patient had already reached their yearly claim limit, a detail the clinic would normally only discover after the scan when the claim bounced back.
Instead, the clinic ran a real-time check while the patient was still on the phone. The system flagged the limit instantly. The staff member explained the situation upfront, quoted the private fee, and avoided a disputed account. No surprise bills. No awkward conversations weeks later.
In another instance, a provider faced a completely rejected claim. Every single item returned a zero-dollar reimbursement with no explanation. Using the platform, they isolated the invalid item combinations, corrected the root cause, and successfully resubmitted the claim for a full $500 reimbursement.
“This is what happens when you replace Medicare guesswork with real-time eligibility checking,” Elizabeth Loughlin notes. “It’s about giving practices the information they need at the exact moment it matters.”
The focus remains entirely on giving staff immediate clarity. The product handles the regulatory weight so the clinic can focus on the patient.
The Right Place for Complexity
The tension between shifting regulations and static software will always exist in healthcare. For decades, the industry accepted that administrative staff would simply have to bridge that gap manually. Elizabeth Loughlin and the team at RebateRight, built a company to prove that assumption wrong. By forcing the software to carry the burden of Medicare compliance, they gave front-desk teams their time back. The system finally does the heavy lifting, leaving the humans to do the actual caring.
Elizabeth Loughlin is the Co-Founder of RebateRight based in Sydney, Australia. She builds health technology platforms that automate Medicare eligibility and simplify billing workflows for healthcare providers. To connect with Elizabeth or learn more, visit her LinkedIn profile or rebateright.com.au.
