RCM Squad Identity Badges

SimplePractice // Revenue Cycle Management Pillar // Illustration // 2026

About Revenue Cycle Management at SimplePractice

Revenue cycle management is the financial backbone of SimplePractice's value to practitioners. It covers every step between a clinical encounter and a collected payment, including insurance verification, claim creation and submission, clearinghouse routing, payer adjudication, denial management, patient responsibility calculation, and reconciliation. When RCM works well, it is invisible. Sessions happen, claims flow, and payments arrive. When it fails, it becomes the primary reason a practice cannot sustain itself financially.

At SimplePractice, the RCM pillar supports tens of thousands of mental health providers who depend on the platform to manage the full financial lifecycle of their practice. The squads within RCM own distinct but deeply interdependent domains, from the foundational infrastructure that connects to payers and clearinghouses, to the intelligent automation that detects and resolves billing exceptions before a practitioner ever notices them. This is complex, high-stakes, collaborative work, and the people doing it are worth celebrating.

Why Team Identity Gets Hard Work Done

Teams that know who they are do better work. That sentence sounds obvious, but the research behind it is worth understanding. Google's Project Aristotle studied hundreds of internal teams and found that psychological safety, shared meaning, and a sense of belonging were stronger predictors of team effectiveness than individual talent or technical skill. Identity is not a soft investment. It is a structural one.

A 2022 Gallup meta-analysis covering over 2.7 million employees found that teams with strong cohesion show 21% higher profitability and 17% higher productivity compared to disengaged counterparts. The mechanism is straightforward. When people feel they belong to something with a name and a character, they bring more of themselves to it. They protect it. They feel the weight of what they're building together in a way that a Jira board and a Confluence page cannot manufacture.

This matters most for teams doing unglamorous but mission-critical work. Revenue cycle management does not generate user delight or appear in product launches. The people doing it carry more of the platform's financial integrity than any other pillar, and they deserve to feel that weight as a source of pride rather than anonymity.

About the Badge Series

The RCM Squad Identity Badges are a set of eight collectible sticker and pin designs, each one representing a squad within the RCM pillar at SimplePractice. The visual language draws from art deco foil-stamped tarot cards, WWII-era military mission patches, and fine line enamel pin design. Every illustration is rendered in single-weight gold line work on a dark charcoal ground, flat and clean enough to trace in Adobe Illustrator at any scale.

Each badge shares a consistent visual grammar: a shape-defined border with double-rule framing, a reserved monogram medallion for the squad's initials, a dedicated text band for the squad name, a radiating starburst anchoring the central illustration, and a lower ornamental cluster with thematic detail. The consistency across the set is intentional. Every badge belongs to the same family, and every squad knows it.

Each animal was chosen for metaphorical precision rather than decoration. The creature's behavior, biology, or cultural resonance maps directly onto the squad's function and character. The series spans eight distinct geometric shapes, oval, diamond, hexagon, inverted triangle, octagon, circle, square, and upright triangle, giving each squad a silhouette as distinctive as its animal.

The Squads

Billing & Payments // The Magpie

Magpies are relentless, intelligent collectors of valuables. They never miss what glitters and never let go of what they find. This squad processes payments, allocates credits, and generates receipts with the same precision and persistence. The oval badge gives the magpie's silhouette room to display its wingspan and its prizes.

Client Insurance // The Armadillo

Armadillos carry their coverage with them everywhere they go, armored, self-contained, and built to protect what is inside. This squad manages member IDs, copay calculations, and coverage status verification, making sure every patient's financial responsibility is understood before care is delivered. The diamond badge frames the armadillo's shell as a heraldic shield.

Insurance Foundation // The Badger

Badgers build the deep, essential underground structures that everything above ground depends on. This squad owns the payer connections, plan configurations, and clearinghouse integrations that make all other RCM work possible. Stubborn, reliable, and impossible to dislodge, the badger earned the hexagon badge, a shape that reflects the structural geometry the whole pillar rests on.​​​​​​​

Insurance Onboarding // The Penguin

Penguins escort new arrivals into the colony with care, precision, and unmistakable formality. This squad guides practices through enrollment, NPI verification, and the full onboarding journey, ensuring every provider enters the system properly credentialed and ready to bill. The inverted triangle badge mirrors the penguin's own silhouette: wide at the shoulders, pointed at purpose.

Managed Billing // The Octopus

Octopuses manage multiple independent streams at once, each arm operating with its own intelligence while the whole organism stays coordinated. This squad owns work queues, SLA management, auto-assignment, and practice onboarding and offboarding. Eight workflows, zero dropped claims. The octagon was chosen deliberately: eight sides for eight arms, and a sixteen-ray starburst echoing the octopus's distributed intelligence.

Claim Management // The Carrier Pigeon

Carrier pigeons exist for one purpose: reliable delivery across a defined lifecycle, with status tracked from departure to arrival. This squad manages claims from creation through submission, clearinghouse routing, and final adjudication, paid or denied, with a record and a destination for every one. The circle badge draws from WWII-era mission patch design, honoring the historically heroic nature of getting the message through.

Billing Assistant // The Phoenix

A phoenix rises from its own ash not despite the burning, but because of it. The destruction is the mechanism. This badge captures the transformative potential of AI-assisted billing: processes that were manual, error-prone, and exhausting become automated, accurate, and self-correcting. The upright triangle channels the wings and flame toward a single apex, with the monogram medallion sitting inside the ash bed as the literal origin point of the rebirth.

Design by Leonardo De La Rocha // SimplePractice Design // 2026