Cedar
Patient financial experience platform for hospitals, health systems, and physician groups, covering the part of revenue cycle the patient actually experiences: the bill. Cedar Intelligence is the AI decision engine personalizing billing journeys across channels, and Kora is the voice agent, launched April 2025 and developed with Twilio, trained on the company's proprietary billing data rather than a general model. Kora resolves common billing inquiries on first contact, explaining charges, identifying payment options, and connecting patients to financial assistance, with sentiment and tone detection, multiple language support including Spanish, and escalation to a live agent with full context when human judgment is required. One year in, the company reports Kora has handled nearly 400,000 patient calls across ten provider organizations spanning Epic and Cerner health systems, physician staffing groups, and large specialty groups, with Gastro Health alone accounting for more than 60,000 calls since September 2025. Kora Outbound extends the agent to proactive engagement of harder to reach patients. The company reports its platform data foundation exceeds one billion patient interactions. Its own published research is unusually pointed for a vendor: 40 percent of collectible dollars on its platform now come from uninsured patients, up 54 percent in three years, and it argues that billing experiences designed for financially stable patients are failing those under the greatest strain.
Capability Axes
Cedar Intelligence and the Kora voice agent are genuine model driven capability, and Kora is trained on the company's own billing interaction data rather than a general model, which is the substantive differentiation claim. Held back from A because the underlying business is a patient payments and billing platform that predates the AI and functions without it; Kora and the personalization engine are layers on a payments product, which the company's own framing as a performance engine for financial experience reflects.
The escalation design is stated with the detail this axis rewards: Kora escalates to a live agent with full context whenever human judgment is required, so the patient does not restart the conversation, and the vendor positions the agent explicitly as first level triage that lets call center staff work on complex interactions rather than as a replacement for them. Sentiment and tone detection is a meaningful control in this specific context, since a billing call is often an emotionally charged interaction and a distressed caller is precisely who should reach a person quickly.
Deployment evidence is specific, dated, and includes a named site with volume: nearly 400,000 calls handled in Kora's first year across ten provider organizations, with Gastro Health accounting for more than 60,000 calls since September 2025 across 120 plus locations. The original target, automating 30 percent of inbound billing calls, was published in advance and is therefore checkable, which is rarer than it should be. Held back from A because actual containment against that target is not reported, and resolution quality, as distinct from call volume handled, is unpublished.
Unusual for this index: the company publishes research examining who its own category underserves, reporting that billing experiences built for financially stable patients are failing those under greater financial strain, and that nearly 40 percent of collectible dollars on its platform now come from uninsured patients, up 54 percent in three years. Naming a population its own product historically served poorly is a genuine equity disclosure. Held back from A because no evaluation of the AI itself for differential performance across patient groups was retrieved, and a personalization engine deciding how aggressively to pursue payment from whom is exactly where that analysis belongs.
No public pricing. Contact the vendor. Enterprise agreements with provider organizations. Note the vendor's own disclaimer that certain functionality may require third party integrations or service specific fees, and that published metrics draw on pilot data from 2024 through 2026, so figures cited in marketing may not reflect general availability performance.
Tightly bounded to patient financial engagement across health systems, physician groups, and clinician staffing organizations, with stated coverage of Epic and Cerner environments and athenaOne practices. No clinical claims are made, which is correct for a billing product.
Pricing
Vendor-published figures are labeled as such. Figures labeled “Estimated” are derived from third-party sources and have not been confirmed by the vendor.
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Contact the vendor
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Enterprise agreements with provider organizations; payments platform plus AI modules | — | — | Vendor Published |
No rate card published. Enterprise agreements with health systems, physician groups, and staffing organizations. Two caveats the vendor itself publishes are worth carrying into procurement: certain functionality may require third party integrations or service specific fees, and headline metrics for Kora, Cedar Intelligence, Cedar Cover, and Cedar Support reference pilot and survey data from 2024 through 2026 rather than general availability performance. Establish whether the voice agent is priced per call, per resolved interaction, or bundled into the payments platform, since a per resolution model aligns vendor incentives with containment while a per call model does not.