Waystar and Meditech Team on Healthcare Payments

Healthcare payments firm Waystar has launched a collaboration with electronic health records provider Meditech.

The partnership, announced Thursday (Feb. 1), lets healthcare organizations that use Meditech leverage Waystar’s platform to simplify their financial operations.

“As administrative expenses increasingly weigh on the U.S. healthcare system, partnerships like Waystar and Meditech are essential to reducing the burden on providers and patients,” the companies said in a news release.

The release cited data from the Journal of the American Medical Association showing the annual cost of wasteful healthcare spending ranging from$760 billion to $935 billion in recent years, or nearly 25% of total healthcare spending.

The companies said Waystar’s cloud-based platform addresses the problem by using artificial intelligence (AI) and advanced analytics to automate payment workflows, improve claim and billing accuracy, and lower labor costs.

Paired with Meditech’s offering, “healthcare organizations will be better equipped to streamline complex processes, improve productivity, and enhance financial visibility,” the release said.

Research from PYMNTS Intelligence and Rectangle Health has shown that digital healthcare management and payment options can help providers improve their relationships with patients while also making sure that they get paid.

“Doctors and dentists alike are adopting these solutions at a time when much of the business end of healthcare remains mired in paper invoicing and unpaid debt,” PYMNTS wrote earlier this month, citing the report “Connected Healthcare: What Consumers Want From Their Healthcare Customer Experiences.”

The partnership between Meditech and Waystar is the latest example of AI’s increasing use in the payments sector, something PYMNTS explored this week in a conversation with Netanel Kabala, chief data and analytics officer at Nuvei.

“I’m excited about everything related to internal efficiency, how [using AI] we can improve all the inner workings of a payments company from reconciliation to customer service, to integrations, and so on,” he said.

Generative AI is especially useful for tasks involving large levels of text and context in a short amount of time, something Kabala said can help improve productivity for customer service, operations and risk teams, by summarizing vast quantities of information to provide insights.

He also said he can see the technology helping create new products and services, including using real-time pricing to enable adaptive pricing solutions, along with using AI to customize financial products, such as buy now, pay later (BNPL) plans and lending options.