Wael Barsoum, MD, president & chief transformation officer at Healthcare Outcomes Performance Co., is leveraging artificial intelligence to save thousands of dollars and streamline administrative tasks.
Dr. Barsoum spoke with Becker’s about the payoffs of those AI models and how the company wants to grow.
Note: This conversation was lightly edited for clarity.
Question: How has HOPCo been using AI to support their revenue cycles?
Dr. Wael Barsoum: We’ve built an entire infrastructure. We have our own AI software engineers, and we’ve been building our own bots in a revenue cycle. Examples of AI use would be for tasks that are repetitive and time consuming to ensure that documentation supports a certain level of billing or making sure that what we’re being reimbursed is consistent with the contract that we have for that procedure.
We have been building our own AI infrastructure to ensure that what we’re billing is accurate and that what we’re getting paid is accurate and appropriate. The whole idea here, in the interest of value, is to be able to provide a higher level, more accurate level of billing veracity for a lower cost. Once you build these bots, they’re running 24 hours a day, seven days a week, you’re not paying them an hourly fee and you’re taking out any potential human error from that process. So far our results have been pretty impressive.
Q: Can you speak to any of the cost savings?
WB: I think everybody is still pretty early in this process. But like one bot that looks at the accuracy of the cycle and the collection saves us $250,000 a year in human expense. That’s just for one of our largest practices.
Q: When you think about growth going into the second half of 2025, what are your main goals for your practice and for HOPCo?
WB: HOPCo is a vertically and horizontally integrated musculoskeletal management platform where we’re dealing with practices, healthcare systems and payers. The areas where we see lots of growth coming up are providing more services to more musculoskeletal practices, especially ones that want to remain independent.
The second area in terms of healthcare systems is we have partnerships with more than 50 hospitals in the United States where we help manage their musculoskeletal data, provide it to them in a more useful information-heavy format and offer consulting services. That’s the light touch all the way to completely managing and owning our own musculoskeletal specialty hospitals. That’s an area that we want to continue to grow, working with more healthcare systems.
Finally, on the value-based care side, we are announcing more and more relationships with payers around the country. Nearly every quarter we’re announcing a new large partnership ranging from managing a surgical bundle all the way to taking full risk on musculoskeletal spending for an entire state.
Finally, we’ve been expanding internationally with our digital footprint. We are now extremely entrenched in England with the National Health Services. Our digital platform is in seven different languages. We’ve just entered Australia, and we’re in active talks about entering into the Middle East. What we’ve learned here in the U.S., we’re happy to help spread those processes around the globe as well.
Q: Can you dive deeper into those efforts? What are the biggest challenges there?
WB: The big things that you have to understand are the legalities of setting up a part of your business overseas. What are the compliance differences? Do we need a local partner that has a whole army of nurses that we can tap into on a per diem basis? Do we have local boots on the ground for administrative and clinical support in that country?
Something as simple as a Quality Incentive Program, which we have here in the United States, in some countries is not legal. So you have to understand how to align the same incentives for providers who may be fully employed by the government versus providers who have no relationship with the government in another country. In some countries where you have predominantly a single payer system versus other countries where you might have multiple payers, understanding the intricacies of that and the payer culture is really, really important to be able to have any success.
Q: What else would you like to discuss?
WB: One other thing we read about in the CMS’ proposed rules for 2026 is the idea around shifting more and more toward cost neutrality. That is something that we need to keep an eye on. Many hospitals’ strategy is to keep things like advanced imaging and lab testing in the hospital-based world where they get higher reimbursement for that. With these incoming site neutrality rules, we may find that hospital-employed specialists may start moving more toward independent groups. I see that as exciting. HOPCo has already helped practices start from scratch for employed providers that decided to leave and set up shop on their own. There’s not many groups that can do that.
