Waystar, the software company that helps hospitals and doctors get paid, grew revenue 21% to $325.6 million in the third quarter and beat Wall Street’s estimates, Fierce Healthcare reported. Its stock still fell about 7% – a sign of how high expectations have climbed for companies selling artificial intelligence to the health-care industry.
Waystar sits in the middle of nearly every medical bill in America. Its software processes more than 8.5 billion payment transactions a year – over $3 trillion in claims – for 30,000 hospital, clinic and insurer clients, and its data touches about a third of U.S. hospital stays. When a hospital sends a bill to your insurance company and the insurer refuses to pay, software like Waystar’s decides what happens next.
That “what happens next” is where the company is betting its future. Waystar’s newest tool reads an insurer’s rejection, figures out why, and resubmits the claim on its own – no human required. Early customers are on pace to recover up to $5 billion a year in previously rejected claims and skip more than 400,000 hours of manual paperwork, CEO Matt Hawkins told analysts. The company says more than 20 AI capabilities are on its near-term roadmap.
Hospitals are buying in. Waystar ended the quarter with 1,488 clients each paying it more than $100,000 a year, up 14%, and landed the biggest new customer in its history – a major East Coast health system with roughly $7 billion in annual patient revenue that is replacing more than 20 separate vendors with Waystar’s platform.
For patients, this corner of the tech world matters more than it looks. Billing and insurance paperwork is one of the biggest hidden costs in American health care, and the companies that automate it influence how quickly claims get settled, how many surprise bills get fixed – and how many billing jobs hospitals still need.
Investors, though, wanted more than a solid quarter. Waystar’s 7% slide after the report suggests Wall Street has already priced in the AI story – and now expects it to keep delivering.
JBizNews Desk | New York
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