Bermuda’s unique healthcare payment system has served as a testing ground for advanced automation that could someday streamline billing and remittance to the tune of as much as $200 million, according to Timmy Brill, project manager at SparkChange, an American-based revenue-cycle platform.

The island is not there yet, he said, although almost no healthcare providers are.

“We worked with Bermuda in 2022 right when they were going live with Pearl [Patient Electronic and Administrative Records Log],” Mr Brill said during a session yesterday at Healthcare CIO Connect, convened by KPMG.

“Because of the payer situation with Bermuda, we had to design really interesting automation where we posted a remit, expecting the right payment, and replacing the payment and the remit once the real payment came in from the Government.”

Mr Brill said the wider healthcare industry is “on a huge inflection point” as hospitals move away from people and process-driven strategies towards technology-based revenue-cycle management.

“If you don’t have the right partners, if you don’t have the right analytics, if you don’t have the right automations, you’re going to be falling behind,” he said.

He added that analytics and automation are now “by far your largest puzzle pieces” in an effective revenue-cycle process. “Historically, there are four pieces to a successful revenue-cycle process … strategy, support, analytics and automation,” he said. “In a new revenue cycle, this is flipped.”

He pointed to Olive, a much touted artificial-intelligence-based healthcare company that collapsed in 2023, as a cautionary tale for the industry.

“I bet most people have kind of heard of Olive,” he said. “They were a super fast-growing start-up … and they failed. They hired so many salespeople. They had one solution that worked.

“It worked, it was great, but they promised 100 solutions, all of which were built on manual processes or just didn’t work at all. But the key is they had the right idea. This space is prime for disruption.”

However, Mr Brill cited positive outcomes achieved elsewhere through automation, including a 27 per cent decrease in disrupted accounts receivable in 18 months and 3.2 million automated actions in a month for one client. Another health system, he said, “was able to turn around their cash goals, like $200 million in one year … primarily due to getting rid of all these $0 balances.”

While full “touchless” billing powered by artificial intelligence remains a goal, Mr Brill said the technology is advancing quickly.