How to Automate Waystar

Every dollar a hospital bills leaves through Waystar

Waystar is the software a hospital's claims travel through on the way to a payer, and the software the answer comes back through. For a revenue cycle team it is the day's worklist: what went out, what got paid, what came back refused. Long-serving billing staff still say Navicure or ZirMed, the two companies that merged in 2017 and took the Waystar name the year after.

The platform is organised around that journey. Financial clearance happens before the visit, with Eligibility Verification, Coverage Detection and Authorization. Claim Manager handles submission, Remit + Deposit Management posts what comes back, and Denial + Appeal Management is where the refusals collect.

That last screen is what people mean when they say they live in Waystar. Every denial landing on it carries a reason code, a payer, a dollar amount and an appeal window that started counting the moment it posted. Working that queue is a department.

The denial queue gets copied out by hand each morning

Watch a denial team at eight in the morning and most of what you see is transcription.

The queue is read in Waystar. The ones that matter are copied into a spreadsheet, because that is where the team tracks who is working what and what has been tried. A write-off recommendation goes to the manager who approves it, then sits in an inbox for a fortnight.

Then the outside work. A reason code says the service was not authorised, and the history that would settle it sits on the payer's own site. A remittance came in short, and showing it fell below contract means opening the agreement and the fee schedule. A corrected claim went out three weeks ago and has gone quiet, and learning whether it was even received means signing in somewhere else.

None of it is judgement. It is opening things, reading them, and typing what they said somewhere else.

Waystar

Denials in front of the right person same day New refusals read off the queue with reason code, payer and amount attached, routed before the appeal window has eaten a week.

Underpayments proved rather than suspected Each remittance checked against the contracted rate, so a short payment arrives as a line with a number on it.

Internal approvals that stop stalling Write-off recommendations and resubmissions that have waited too long for a signature, surfaced with the balance and the days outstanding.

Waystar moves what reaches it as a transaction

Waystar automates a great deal of this, and a team that has not switched all of it on should start there.

Claim Manager scrubs and submits. Claim Monitoring follows a claim after it leaves, so a submission that goes silent is visible rather than assumed. Denial + Appeal Management is the strong one: it prioritises the denials most likely to be overturned, routes them to the right work group, and through AltitudeCreate drafts appeal correspondence and fills payer-specific forms from a library, with tracking and proof of delivery after. Remit + Deposit Management turns remittances and lockbox paper into posted payments.

Notice the shape they share. Each acts on something that arrived as a transaction: a claim going out, a remittance coming back, an eligibility response. That network is what Waystar has spent years building, and it is wide.

The ceiling is everything a payer puts on a screen instead of in a file. The authorisation history behind a code. Correspondence in a plan's provider portal. A workers' compensation carrier reached only by logging in. And the hospital's own side: the tracking sheet the team lives in, the manager whose approval is outstanding, the inbox where a follow-up waits.

Denials worked in the order their clocks demand

Work in a revenue cycle office starts on that queue and then has to be carried outward. The carrying can be handed over.

New denials read as they post, with reason code, payer and amount attached, and put in front of the person who works that payer while the appeal window is still generous. High-dollar refusals escalated on their own path, because the gap between a small denial and a forty-thousand-dollar one is not a position in a sort order, it is a different phone call.

Each remittance checked against the contracted rate, so an underpayment becomes a line with a number beside it rather than a suspicion voiced in a meeting. Denials tagged by root cause, registration against authorisation against coding, so the pattern is arguable at the next payer review. Corrected claims tracked past the payer's normal response time and chased before the trail cools. Overturned appeals caught the day they flip, so the win is counted.

This is billing inside a hospital, so the line sits where money and records are. Reading, comparing and assembling runs unattended. Anything that alters a claim, submits an appeal or writes off a balance waits for the person authorised to do it.

The lookups come off the denial team's morning

Almost every item there is somebody signing into a website, reading a status that has not moved since yesterday, and typing it onto a tracking sheet.

WebRun is an AI agent that drives a real Chrome browser, signed in the way your billing staff sign in. It opens Waystar alongside the payer portals, the contract file and the sheet the team works from, reads each screen, and brings back a worklist with the claim, the payer, the amount and the deadline attached.

It runs on your schedule in your own private environment. Sessions are not shared between workflows, a workflow can be restricted to a named list of sites, and any run can be watched and stopped.

The workflows below are already built, and each one names what it opens.