Waystar (NASDAQ:WAY) outlined its strategy to expand its healthcare revenue-cycle-management platform through artificial intelligence, automation and broader adoption of its end-to-end product suite during its inaugural Investor Day in San Antonio.
Chief Executive Officer Matt Hawkins said the company’s strategy centers on category leadership in revenue cycle, a connected platform spanning pre-encounter through post-encounter workflows, and a longer-term vision for an “autonomous revenue cycle.” He said Waystar serves more than 1.5 million providers and over 32,000 clients, reaches about 60% of the U.S. patient population and now processes nearly 8.5 billion insurance transactions annually.
AI strategy targets administrative complexity
Hawkins said healthcare providers face rising operational pressure, including constrained margins, staffing turnover and payer-related denials. He characterized the revenue-cycle market as a more than $20 billion opportunity for Waystar’s current software offerings, with a further adjacent services opportunity that could expand the company’s addressable market to roughly twice that size.
Waystar’s AI strategy is intended to reduce manual work, predict and prevent denials, automate selected tasks and shift revenue-cycle activity earlier in the patient journey. Hawkins said providers increasingly want to consume AI through trusted vendors rather than build and secure their own AI tools. He cited third-party research indicating that nearly 90% of providers prefer that approach.
William Chan, Waystar’s Chief AI Officer and a co-founder of Iodine, said the company’s competitive position rests on four pillars: mission-critical workflow infrastructure, proprietary data, an extensively deployed network and revenue-cycle domain expertise. Iodine joined Waystar last year, adding clinical documentation, utilization management and revenue-capture capabilities to Waystar’s patient-access and claims-management products.
“Waystar is the revenue cycle’s system of action,” Chan said. “This is where work gets done.”
Brendan O’Connor, executive vice president of product management, said Waystar connects with more than 5,000 payers and integrates with more than 500 electronic health record and practice-management systems. Those connections, combined with transaction and payment data, allow the company to identify payer-specific reimbursement behavior and apply those insights directly into provider workflows, he said.
Product roadmap includes agentic AI and new monetization paths
Waystar highlighted several product initiatives for the remainder of 2026 and into 2027. These include an omnichannel billing agent for patient financial communications, agentic capabilities in coding and clinical documentation, emergency-department status decision support, denial prediction before claim submission, automated claim resubmission and conversational analytics.
The company said it is pursuing two primary paths to monetize AI. First, it is adding premium AI and automation capabilities to existing products. Second, it is introducing new solutions for workflows that have historically required manual labor or services.
O’Connor cited pre-bill anomaly detection as an example of a new category using clinical documentation, coding behavior and patient data to identify issues before claims are submitted. He also pointed to Recoupment Manager, a product designed to automate identification and reconciliation of payer take-backs. Waystar said the product can reduce the time providers spend reconciling recoupments by more than 80%.
Sean Joyce, executive vice president of software engineering, said the company’s AltitudeAI architecture combines clinical data, claims and transaction data, payer policies, observed adjudication behavior and 2.5 million claims rules and edits. Waystar has developed payer-specific models because insurers can handle similar claims differently, he said.
Joyce also said AI is improving Waystar’s internal software-development process. During the first half of 2026, the company saw 15% more software commits per engineer and about 1.6 times more code per commit, which he said translated into roughly 1.8 times more software output per engineer. He said Waystar used its AI-first development process to launch Recoupment Manager in under six months, compared with an initial estimate of 14 months.
Growth model and capital priorities
Hawkins reiterated Waystar’s long-term targets of low-double-digit revenue growth and adjusted EBITDA margins above 40%. He said the company has exceeded its adjusted EBITDA margin target in every quarter since becoming public and targets approximately 70% conversion of adjusted EBITDA into free cash flow on an annual basis.
The company reported net leverage of 2.5 times and said it expects to continue reducing debt. Hawkins identified organic innovation, balance-sheet strengthening and share repurchases as the company’s top capital-allocation priorities, while saying Waystar would continue to evaluate disciplined M&A opportunities.
Waystar also announced two executive additions. Alpana Wegner joined as chief financial officer about three weeks before the event, while Amit Khanna joined as chief product and technology officer. Khanna previously led Salesforce’s healthcare business and helped build Agentforce for Health, according to Hawkins.
Clients emphasize consolidation and trusted AI adoption
During a client panel, revenue-cycle leaders from EyeSouth Partners, University Hospitals, Advocate Health, SCA Health and CHRISTUS Health described Waystar as a partner in consolidating fragmented technology environments and supporting workflow standardization.
Lisa Griffin, chief consumer officer at University Hospitals, said the organization sought to move away from managing numerous vendor relationships. She said its Waystar and Epic implementation helped it standardize registration and scheduling processes and enabled University Hospitals to receive $20 million back from Epic.
Steve Burr, senior vice president of revenue cycle at CHRISTUS Health, said Waystar helped the organization begin transmitting claims within three business days after a major claims-provider data breach disrupted operations in February 2024.
Panelists said they see AI as an opportunity to reduce low-value administrative work, though they also emphasized the need for security, controls and trusted partners. Genevieve Sagett, chief revenue cycle officer at SCA Health, said providers also need payers to improve their processes for the industry to achieve a more autonomous revenue cycle.
About Waystar (NASDAQ:WAY)
Waystar (NASDAQ:WAY) is a leading provider of cloud-based revenue cycle management and payment solutions for healthcare organizations. The company’s unified platform streamlines the entire financial continuum of patient care, from eligibility verification and claim submission to payment reconciliation and patient billing. By automating key processes and improving claim accuracy, Waystar helps providers reduce administrative overhead, accelerate cash flow and enhance overall revenue performance.
At the core of Waystar’s offering is a SaaS-based architecture that integrates seamlessly with existing electronic health record (EHR) systems and payer networks.
