Waystar Taps Google Gemini for Healthcare AI
Healthcare payments company Waystar is partnering with Google Cloud to integrate Gemini large language models into its platform. The collaboration aims to create an 'autonomous revenue cycle' by embedding generative and agentic AI directly into financial and clinical workflows for healthcare providers.
This collaboration builds on a partnership first launched in early 2024. In 2025, Waystar utilized Google Cloud to introduce generative AI capabilities for preventing and recovering claim denials. That initiative, dubbed Waystar AltitudeAI, has already prevented over $15 billion in denied claims and cut the time spent on appeals by 90%. Waystar has demonstrated strong financial growth leading up to this expanded AI push. The company reported a 24% year-over-year revenue increase in the fourth quarter of 2025, reaching $303.5 million, with an adjusted EBITDA margin of 43%. For the full fiscal year 2025, revenue hit $1.1 billion, a 17% increase from the previous year. The partnership aims to leverage Google's multimodal Gemini models, which can process not just text but also voice and visual data, within a HIPAA-compliant cloud infrastructure. A prior proof-of-concept study between Waystar and Google Cloud focused on automating prior authorization requirements. The application reportedly reduced the time to generate a preauthorization report by 99.93% while increasing accuracy by 13%. The goal of an "autonomous revenue cycle" is to use AI, machine learning, and automation to handle end-to-end financial processes with minimal human intervention. This includes tasks like medical coding, insurance eligibility checks, and managing claim denials. The push for this technology is driven by industry-wide challenges like staff shortages and rising operational costs. Waystar is not alone in pursuing AI-driven revenue management; competitors like R1 RCM, FinThrive, and Oracle Health are also developing similar capabilities. The market is seeing a significant shift from simple automation to more complex "agentic AI," where AI agents can make decisions and manage entire workflows. Over 75% of U.S. health systems plan to expand their use of AI-driven RCM automation. The company's performance has been bolstered by strong demand, with the number of bookings over $1 million in the second half of 2025 more than double the quarterly average of the past three years. Waystar projects its total revenue for 2026 to be between $1.274 billion and $1.294 billion.
