The least pleasant part of almost any healthcare appointment is the bill. And that’s not just for patients; hospitals and practices face their own series of challenges when it comes to billing and patient management.
The demands of the industry in this regard have posed a unique challenge to developers, one that Altura Health CEO Michelle Romero has embraced with relish. An engineering science graduate, Romero’s response revolutionized the sector, and her subsequent journey has earned her a spot in The CEO Magazine’s Women of Influence 2026.
“I was given a brief to create a system that could handle the operational complexity of Australian private hospitals,” she recalls. “I believed I could build something solid and technically sound.”
Courage and persistence
The result is the work done by Altura Health, Australia’s leading provider of hospital billing and patient administration systems to private hospitals. But it wasn’t an overnight success.
“My journey has been long, over two decades in this industry and very hands-on,” Romero says. “I’ve written code, supported customers at odd hours, rebuilt teams, worked through complex healthcare regulations and led through industry change.”
All this ultimately aided her in growing the company, which was founded in 1992, into the industry giant it is today, with a distributed team across three countries.
“You can’t evolve a business by nostalgia.”
Romero’s journey with Altura Health began in 2015, and she stepped into the CEO role in 2021. She says that despite falling into a leadership position, she didn’t seek it out, but once she was there, she saw her purpose.
“What kept me here was the realization of just how demanding this sector is,” she explains. “For me, the biggest challenge has been transforming a long-standing, founder-led business into a modern, scalable health technology company without losing the trust and stability that made it successful in the first place.”
Healthcare administration is a high-pressure, highly governed environment. Anyone stepping into the ring must deal with funding rules, compliance requirements, privacy obligations and constant policy changes, all layered on top of the everyday urgency of patient care.
“Systems don’t just need to function; they need to be resilient, accurate and audit-ready,” Romero points out.
When she took on the CEO role, Romero immediately began to apply this line of thinking to the company she inherited.
“Legacy businesses carry history, habits and embedded ways of working,” she says. “Some of that is valuable; some of it quietly limits growth. My role required making clear decisions about what to preserve and what to evolve.”
Building an accountable system
That meant modernizing Altura Health’s technology architecture, professionalizing operations, introducing clearer governance, stronger accountability and more defined leadership structures. It wasn’t always comfortable.
“But you can’t evolve a business by nostalgia,” Romero says. “The key to overcoming this challenge was clarity of direction and consistency.
“I communicated the long-term vision repeatedly. I invested in systems before they were urgent. I built leadership depth instead of centralizing control. And I stayed focused on durability over speed.”
Slowly but surely, a disciplined, incremental transformation was achieved.
“That requires resilience, especially when you’re asking people to move from familiar to better,” she adds.
“We exist to reduce friction in healthcare administration.”
Of the many changes Romero has overseen at Altura Health, she’s most proud of the company culture and its loyalty-driven growth.
“In healthcare technology, reputation compounds slowly,” she says. “Many of our clients have been with us for years, some even decades, and all our growth comes from referrals. That tells me we’re doing the right things for the right reasons.”
Internally, staff retention is strong.
“People stay because they feel ownership, clarity and respect,” she notes.
And this is the team Romero is taking forward to tackle the next generation of challenges presented by an ever-changing industry.
“We have several priorities over the next 18 months, starting with platform evolution and interoperability,” she reveals.
“Healthcare data can’t live in silos, so we’re investing heavily in architecture that allows our patient administration system to integrate more intelligently across the healthcare ecosystem.”
AI adoption
AI inevitably has a part to play too, but Romero insists Altura Health’s focus is on practical application.
“Automation that reduces administration burden, improves billing accuracy and strengthens compliance without compromising safety or privacy is what we’re striving for there,” she explains.
It’s a canny response to the three major shifts Romero foresees impacting her industry over the next decade.
“Interoperability mandates and data transparency is one, AI-driven automation in administrative workflows is another, and there’ll be increasing compliance complexity in funding and reporting,” she says.
“The organizations that succeed will be those that combine regulatory fluency with technical agility.”
“I’m proud to be a technical founder in a sector that needs both engineering discipline and empathy.”
All this will help Altura Health’s existing brands – cloud-based patient administration system FYDO, medical billing service MYNT and online admission form Preadmit – thrive and even better align with the company’s purpose.
“We exist to reduce friction in healthcare administration,” Romero says. “That sounds simple, but in practice it means being obsessively responsive and accountable to the people who rely on our systems every day.”
As a woman in a tech leadership position, Romero has a unique vantage point to share with those who would follow in her footsteps.
“I want more women to back their technical instincts and commercial intelligence,” she says. “Healthcare needs builders and operators, women who are comfortable in this endless complexity.
“I hope that my being recognized as one of this year’s Women of Influence shows that grit and depth matter.”
Romero has spent a long time working alongside significant challenges, but despite the stress, she says she wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.
“It hasn’t been glamorous. It’s been iterative, gritty and occasionally terrifying,” she admits. “But it’s also deeply rewarding. I’m proud to be a technical founder in a sector that needs both engineering discipline and empathy.”
