Industry — healthcare
Collect it before it costs you 40 cents on the dollar.
Once a patient balance is placed with a collection agency, the agency keeps 15–40% of whatever it recovers — and on hospital placements it recovers about 15% in the first place. The cheapest dollar you will ever collect is the one that never gets placed.
The arithmetic of placement
This is not a patient-experience argument. It is a margin argument, and the numbers are not close.
| Collected in your portal | Placed with an agency | |
|---|---|---|
| What you keep of each dollar recovered | All of it, less card processing | 60–85% — the agency keeps 15–40% |
| How much gets recovered at all | Highest while the balance is current | ≈15.3% overall on hospital placements |
| When the money arrives | Immediately, at any hour | 80% of it inside the first 60 days, then a long tail of fees |
| Cost to service the payment | Self-service | Agent-assisted phone contact can cost up to 80× a self-service payment |
The pool is growing, and it is getting harder to collect. Patient responsibility rose from 6.8% to 7.3% of net patient revenue in a single year while the collection rate on that patient-owed share fell from 45.1% to 42.4%. A patient dollar costs 25–30 cents to collect; a commercial-payer dollar costs 4–5 cents.
Meanwhile the leverage that made placement work is eroding. Following the 2022–2023 credit-reporting changes, collectors reported measurable declines in recovery — one from 17.1% to 12.7% in two years — in the CFPB’s own rulemaking record.
We are not going to tell you to fire your collection agency
You would be right to ignore us if we did. Something like 83% of hospitals already outsource part of the revenue cycle and roughly 70% intend to outsource more — not because it is cheaper per dollar, but because billing and collections roles are genuinely hard to staff and hold. A portal does not hire anyone.
So the goal is narrower and more useful: shrink the pool of dollars that ever has to reach placement. Keep balances payable the moment a statement lands, at 11pm, on a phone, in Spanish, without anyone in your billing office picking up. Put a payment plan in front of a patient who would otherwise ignore a bill they cannot pay at once. Whatever residue is left, place it — and pay the fee on a much smaller number.
That is a claim we can stand behind. “Replace your agency” is not, and any vendor who says it has not looked at how hospitals actually staff their billing offices.
Why a collections company is the right vendor for this
Most patient-payment vendors come from healthcare software. We came from collections, which is where these balances end up.
We already handle medical debt
We have built for providers directly
Consumer-collections compliance is our day job
What patients get
Roughly three quarters of consumers say they want to pay medical bills online, while about 71% of providers still collect primarily through paper and manual processes. The gap is the opportunity.
Self-service portal
Payment plans
One guarantor, many accounts
Phone payments
On HIPAA, plainly
We hold a Business Associate Agreement with Amazon Web Services, which covers the infrastructure our platform runs on. Handling protected health information on your behalf also makes EveryBill a Business Associate to you, so there is a BAA between us as well.
What we will not tell you is that we are “HIPAA compliant.” No one certifies a vendor as HIPAA compliant, and a BAA with our cloud provider is one input rather than the whole answer. Before protected health information moves, we run a readiness review with you in writing: what you intend to send, where it lands, which services touch it, and where our own remediation stands. You will get a direct answer, including where it is unfinished.
For deployments involving PHI we recommend Silo or Sovereign — a dedicated AWS account holding only your data, which your own team or assessor can audit directly in CloudTrail and Security Hub rather than waiting on a report we write about ourselves. Under Sovereign the account and the encryption keys are yours outright.
To be clear about something vendors often blur: no regulation we are aware of requires single-tenant hosting for PHI. Dedicated accounts are a risk decision we made and think is right. Evaluate it on the merits, not because someone told you it was mandatory. Our trust center sets out what we run and what we do not claim.
Sources
- Agency contingency 15–40% and hospital recovery ≈15.3%: HFMA, citing an ACA International survey.
- 80% of agency recovery arrives in the first 60 days: HFMA, 2019.
- Patient responsibility 6.8%→7.3% of net patient revenue and collection rate 45.1%→42.4%: Kodiak Solutions, March 2026.
- Cost to collect a patient dollar versus a payer dollar: Hospitalogy, July 2026.
- Declining collector recovery rates after credit-reporting changes: CFPB final rule record, January 2025.
- Outsourcing prevalence and intent to expand: KPMG Corporate Finance, 2025.
- Agent-assisted contact cost versus self-service: Gartner, via Payments Dive, 2025.
- Patient preference for online payment versus provider readiness: J.P. Morgan / InstaMed.
Work out what you are placing that you should not be
Tell us roughly what you place with an agency each year and what you currently collect online. We will walk through where the recoverable dollars are and be straight with you about what is ready.