Cedar has launched Kora Platform, an agentic AI system designed to automate patient billing and create a more connected financial experience across healthcare organizations. The platform can independently handle inbound and outbound phone calls, conduct two-way text conversations and provide healthcare providers with detailed reporting on patient collections. Cedar developed Kora as healthcare costs increasingly shift toward patients and traditional billing tools struggle to manage complex financial interactions across multiple channels.
Kora's autonomous voice capabilities can perform a range of billing tasks, including patient verification, real-time insurance eligibility checks, payment processing and insurance information capture. The system can also explain bills, answer questions about outstanding balances and provide guidance on payment options. On the outbound side, Kora can proactively contact patients to collect missing insurance information, resolve coordination-of-benefits issues, facilitate payments and help eligible individuals navigate Medicaid enrollment.
A central feature of the platform is its ability to recognize patient intent and adapt conversations accordingly. Kora can distinguish between someone who does not understand a bill, a patient who cannot currently afford a payment or someone who needs assistance accessing HSA funds. Rather than routing every patient through the same scripted workflow, the AI can adjust its response and recommend different next steps based on the individual's financial situation and needs.
Kora also incorporates long-term conversational memory, allowing it to recall information from previous calls or text exchanges. Cedar says this is particularly important for healthcare billing because financial issues frequently require multiple interactions over several weeks. For example, resolving a denied claim might involve updating insurance information, waiting for a claim to be reprocessed and subsequently collecting the remaining patient balance. By retaining context across these interactions, Kora aims to reduce repetitive questions and create a more continuous financial experience.
Cedar reports that Kora's inbound voice technology has already handled more than 600,000 patient conversations, with approximately 40% of calls resolved without requiring a live agent. The company also reported a 7.4% increase in patients attempting to make payments compared with interactions handled by live agents, while outbound calls have achieved a 20% pickup rate. Patients have rated their interactions with Kora an average of four out of five, according to Cedar.
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