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If you’re comparing Hyro, an AI healthtech vendor, against a traditional RCM BPO provider, the short answer is that they solve different problems and increasingly sit on the
If you’re comparing Hyro, an AI healthtech vendor, against a traditional RCM BPO provider, the short answer is that they solve different problems and increasingly sit on the same procurement shortlist for the same reason: hospitals want less manual admin work and fewer people doing repetitive tasks by hand. Hyro builds AI agents that handle patient facing conversations, scheduling and routing. RCM BPO firms take over the back office work of billing, coding, claims and collections, often with human teams doing the heavy lifting. This guide breaks down what each category actually does, where they overlap, what they cost, and how healthcare organisations (including UK based ones evaluating international vendors) are choosing between them in 2026.
A quick note before we start: both of these categories are built around the US healthcare system, where insurance billing and revenue cycle management work very differently to the NHS. If you’re a UK reader, this guide is most useful if you’re evaluating international healthtech vendors, working with a private UK healthcare provider with US operations, or researching the sector as an investor or analyst.
Hyro is an AI healthtech vendor founded in 2018 at Cornell Tech by Israel Krush and Rom Cohen, originally built around the idea that AI voice and chat agents would become a standard layer between patients and healthcare organisations. It brands itself the “Responsible AI Agent Platform” for healthcare and focuses specifically on patient facing communication rather than clinical or financial back office work.
As of its most recent funding round, Hyro’s platform was deployed across 45 hospital systems and health plans, with over 30 million patients interacting with its voice and chat tools. Clients include large US health systems such as Intermountain Health, Inova, Bon Secours Mercy Health and Baptist Health.
Hyro’s agents are designed to resolve routine patient needs without a human picking up the phone or answering a chat message. According to the company, that includes:
The company claims its agents resolve up to 85% of these routine interactions automatically, which is the figure most often cited in coverage of the platform. It’s worth treating that as a vendor supplied number rather than an independently audited one, since these claims vary by health system and use case.
Hyro raised $45 million (roughly £35 million at current exchange rates, though rates move) in October 2025, in a round led by Healthier Capital with participation from Norwest, Define Ventures, ServiceNow Ventures and Bon Secours Mercy Health, one of its existing clients. That round came just ten months after its previous raise and reportedly doubled the company’s valuation, bringing total funding raised to $95 million (roughly £75 million).
The round funded a product called Proactive Px, which expands Hyro from reactive patient support (answering questions when patients reach out) into proactive outreach across digital and voice channels, aiming to contact patients before they need to call in.
RCM stands for revenue cycle management, the whole financial process a US healthcare provider goes through from a patient booking an appointment to the provider actually getting paid. BPO stands for business process outsourcing, meaning a third party company runs some or all of that process on the provider’s behalf, usually with a mix of software and human staff, and often with an offshore or nearshore delivery team handling the manual parts.
A typical RCM BPO engagement covers:
Large RCM BPO providers, such as R1 RCM and Ensemble, run these processes end to end for hospitals that want to hand over the whole function rather than manage it in house. Smaller and mid-sized players compete more on price or specific niches, like offshore coding or complex claims recovery.
The scale of the problem RCM BPO firms are solving for is genuinely large. National denial rates in the US sit somewhere between 11% and 12%, days in accounts receivable routinely stretch past 50, and billing staff turnover runs between 30% and 40% a year, according to industry benchmarking cited by RCM sector analysts in 2026. That combination of high staff churn and high error rates is exactly why AI is being layered onto (or replacing parts of) traditional RCM outsourcing.
The clearest way to think about the Hyro AI healthtech vendor vs RCM BPO comparison is this: Hyro sits at the front door, RCM BPO sits in the back office. Hyro’s agents talk to patients directly, mostly before or around a clinical visit. RCM BPO firms handle what happens financially after that visit, from coding the encounter correctly through to actually collecting payment.
There’s some overlap creeping in though, and it’s growing. Hyro’s scheduling and registration work touches the very start of the revenue cycle, since accurate registration data feeds directly into billing accuracy downstream. Meanwhile, several RCM BPO vendors have started adding AI powered patient communication tools of their own, particularly around billing questions and payment reminders, which pushes them closer to Hyro’s territory from the other direction.
The direct overlap sits mainly around patient facing billing communication: reminding patients about outstanding balances, answering billing questions, and collecting payment information. Some RCM BPO vendors offer this as a bolt on service, while a platform like Hyro could, in theory, extend its existing conversational AI to cover the same ground.
For most healthcare organisations though, this isn’t really an either or decision. It’s a question of which vendor category to prioritise first, and whether the two eventually need to talk to each other through integration.
This comparison sits inside a bigger industry shift. A Black Book Research survey published in 2025 found that hospitals using AI enabled RCM platforms reported average reductions in cost to collect of between 18% and 28%, alongside better visibility into payer trends and denial patterns. The same research described a “reallocation of enterprise health system budgets away from labor-based BPO models toward scalable, self-improving software ecosystems.”
That doesn’t mean traditional RCM BPO is disappearing. It means the category is being forced to add real AI capability rather than compete purely on offshore labour cost, and several of the larger players (R1 RCM among them) now market themselves as combining AI enabled workflows with hands on execution, rather than one or the other.
For a vendor like Hyro, this shift works in its favour on the patient engagement side, since health systems are increasingly comfortable trusting AI agents with routine conversations that used to require a human. Whether that comfort extends fully into financial and billing conversations, where mistakes cost real money and trust matters more, is still playing out.
Neither category publishes simple, comparable pricing, and that’s genuinely one of the harder parts of this decision for buyers.
Hyro, like most enterprise healthtech AI vendors, doesn’t list public pricing. Deployments are typically priced per health system based on scope, volume and integration complexity, so getting an accurate figure means requesting a quote directly.
RCM BPO pricing more often follows one of two models: a percentage of net collections (commonly somewhere in the low single digit percentages, though this varies a lot by contract and specialty) or a fixed fee per transaction or claim. Some newer AI native RCM platforms, by contrast, have started publishing transparent pricing with no setup fees, specifically to differentiate themselves from the opaque, negotiation heavy pricing traditional BPO contracts are known for.
Whichever model you’re evaluating, get a written breakdown of exactly what’s included before signing anything, since bundled fees can hide the real cost of add ons like implementation, integration or ongoing support.
If you’re actually making this decision, a few practical questions help narrow it down fast:
No. Hyro is a patient facing AI agent platform focused on communication, scheduling and routing, not revenue cycle management. It doesn’t handle claims, coding or collections, though its registration and scheduling data does feed into the revenue cycle indirectly.
RCM BPO stands for revenue cycle management business process outsourcing, meaning a third party company manages some or all of a healthcare provider’s billing and collections process on its behalf. This typically covers eligibility checks, coding, claims submission, denial management and patient billing.
Not entirely, but it’s changing it significantly. Industry research from 2025 found hospitals using AI enabled RCM platforms cut cost to collect by 18% to 28%, pushing budgets away from purely labour based outsourcing models toward AI supported ones, though most large RCM firms are now adding AI rather than being replaced by it.
Hyro doesn’t publish public pricing, and deployments are quoted individually based on the health system’s size, scope and integration needs. If cost transparency matters to you, ask for a detailed quote breakdown before committing, since enterprise healthtech pricing can vary a lot between organisations.
Hyro’s current client base and case studies are built entirely around US health systems and the US insurance model, so there’s no public evidence of NHS or UK private healthcare deployments as of mid-2026. UK organisations considering it would need to evaluate integration with UK specific systems and data protection requirements (UK GDPR) separately.
RCM software is a tool a healthcare provider’s own staff use to manage billing and claims themselves. RCM BPO means handing that process over to an external company’s staff and systems to run on the provider’s behalf, which usually costs more but requires less in-house resourcing.
It depends heavily on scope and existing staffing costs, so there’s no reliable single answer. AI native platforms often work out cheaper at scale because they reduce dependence on large offshore or onshore labour teams, but the upfront integration cost and per-deployment pricing for platforms like Hyro can offset that for smaller organisations.
Yes, in principle, since they cover different parts of the patient and revenue journey. Hyro’s registration and scheduling data can feed into an RCM BPO’s billing processes downstream, though the two systems would need proper integration rather than assuming compatibility out of the box.
