Cedar vs Collectly (2026)
Two patient financial platforms with billing agents, built differently. Cedar builds the patient billing experience for hospitals, health systems and physician groups. Cedar Intelligence personalizes billing journeys across channels, and Kora, its voice agent launched in April 2025, answers billing questions, explains charges, finds payment options and connects patients to financial assistance, handing off to a live agent with full context. Collectly now covers patient financial work across the whole visit, from check in and an eligibility and benefits agent before the visit to cost estimates, payments and Billie, an agent that answers billing questions and takes payments by chat, text, email and voice. A system focused on the billing conversation and financial assistance looks at Cedar. One that wants the patient's financial path from eligibility to payment in one place looks at Collectly.
- Escalation built into the voice agent: Kora detects sentiment and tone and hands off to a live agent with full context when judgment is needed.
- Published research on who the category underserves: Cedar reports that 40 percent of collectible dollars on its platform now come from uninsured patients.
- Deployment figures at named sites: nearly 400,000 Kora calls in its first year across ten organizations, against a 30 percent automation target published in advance.
- Patient financial work across the visit: intake, eligibility and benefits, cost estimates, statements, payment plans and a billing agent in more than 250 languages.
- A bidirectional Epic integration listed in Connection Hub, plus more than 20 record and practice management systems.
- Stated controls: HITRUST i1, controls aligned to SOC 2, a PCI DSS Level 1 processor for card payments, AWS hosting and business associate agreements.
This comparison is published by AI Health Index, an independent research platform that compares healthcare AI vendors objectively. Cedar and Collectly are each graded against the same capability taxonomy, from each vendor's own public materials and the regulatory record, under the AI Health Index verification standard. No vendor pays for placement, and no vendor has reviewed this page. How this evidence is graded
Plain facts
| Fact | Cedar | Collectly |
|---|---|---|
| Primary category | RCM & Prior Auth AI | RCM & Prior Auth AI |
| Headquarters | New York, New York | San Francisco, California |
| Website | cedar.com | collectly.co |
Side by Side
Select any grade to read the note behind it.
Each vendor in one paragraph
Written to be quoted whole. Each paragraph opens the AI Health Index profile of the vendor: what the product is, who buys it and what it does.
Patient financial experience platform for hospitals, health systems and clinician services providers: patient payments (Cedar Pay), coverage and financial assistance (Cedar Cover), billing support (Cedar Support) and the Kora Platform, a suite of AI agents for inbound voice, outbound voice and two way text. Kora verifies the caller's identity, answers billing questions, works coordination of benefits issues, payment plans and Medicaid screening, and transfers to a live agent with the case context when escalation is required.
Source: AI Health Index, July 2026
Collectly sells AI revenue cycle automation for patient financial work across the visit. Before the visit, pre-visit intake automation handles digital check-in, insurance card capture, coverage checks, demographic validation and consents. An AI eligibility and benefits agent verifies coverage, retrieves benefits from clearinghouses and payer portals, interprets copays, deductibles and carve-outs, and identifies prior authorization requirements, and AI cost estimation produces patient responsibility and good faith estimates.
Source: AI Health Index, July 2026
Questions buyers ask
How are Cedar and Collectly priced and sold?
Cedar sells enterprise agreements to health systems and clinician services providers, and Kora is sold modularly: a provider can deploy only the use cases it needs alongside its existing EHR, telephony and call center, without replacing its patient portal. The site's footnote says certain functions may require third party integrations or service specific terms or fees.
Collectly sells through demo requests to medical groups, health systems, billing and revenue cycle companies (which white-label it) and record system vendors (which embed it); the demo form asks for provider count. From the AI Health Index, drawn from each vendor's own published materials and the regulatory record, verified July 22, 2026. No vendor pays for placement.
How do Cedar and Collectly handle patient data?
In Cedar's case, the data here is protected health information joined to payment and financial hardship. Kora verifies the patient's identity before discussing an account, which is the primary safety control for an agent that states what a named person owes.
Collectly describes encryption, access control, audit logs and card tokenization through its processor. It also says Billie 'has been trained on hundreds of thousands of real-world patient billing questions', without saying whose conversations those were, whether they were de-identified, or whether customers' patient interactions continue to train the agent. From the AI Health Index, drawn from each vendor's own published materials and the regulatory record, verified July 22, 2026. No vendor pays for placement.
What evidence is published for Cedar and Collectly?
Cedar's case studies name Gastro Health (Kora voice support), ApolloMD (patient payments up 42 percent), U.S. Anesthesia Partners, NAPA (post insurance payments up over 70 percent), Talkiatry (96 percent of payments online), Unio Health Partners and Advanced Dermatology and Cosmetic Surgery ($9.5 million increase in net profit in one year).
A 2021 case study published through the athenahealth marketplace credits Collectly at CleanSlate Centers, an addiction treatment provider with 76 centers in 10 states, with patient collections up by over 250 percent, paper statements down by over 80 percent and a return on investment above 650 percent. From the AI Health Index, drawn from each vendor's own published materials and the regulatory record, verified July 22, 2026. No vendor pays for placement.
How much do Cedar and Collectly leave to the clinician?
Cedar says it handles routine work end to end, reserves live staff for complex cases, transfers with full context whenever human escalation is required, uses real time sentiment analysis, and gives providers configurable safety controls and auditable decision logs.
With Collectly, the eligibility agent works autonomously 'with human review only when needed' and flags edge cases. When payer data is incomplete or ambiguous it 'applies learned reasoning patterns to infer missing details', so some copay and benefit figures shown to staff or patients may be inferred rather than returned by the payer. From the AI Health Index, drawn from each vendor's own published materials and the regulatory record, verified July 22, 2026. No vendor pays for placement.
Related comparisons
Other published head to head assessments involving these vendors or their closest peers. The full set for this category is on the Patient Voice Agents page.
Cedar's record has not yet been reviewed on this site, so its side of this page rests on the build record. Cedar notes its cited figures draw on 2024 to 2026 pilot data, and it does not report actual containment against its 30 percent target.
Collectly's billing agent escalates to staff when needed and publishes no rule for when. A wrong billing answer can push a patient into an unwarranted payment or toward collections, so ask both how a distressed or confused caller reaches a person, and ask for the baseline behind any collection lift figure.