Collectly announced today that its AI‑driven patient billing platform is now natively integrated with Epic’s Connection Hub on the Epic Showroom. The bidirectional integration embeds Collectly’s “Billie” AI agent directly into Epic‑powered electronic health records, allowing hospitals and large medical groups to automate payment reminders, answer billing questions in real time, and capture payments without leaving the Epic workflow.
The move marks a rare instance of a fintech solution slipping cleanly into a legacy health‑IT ecosystem. By leveraging Epic’s status as the de‑facto system of record for U.S. hospitals, Collectly promises to turn static balance data into actionable, patient‑centric outreach—something the industry has struggled to achieve at scale.
How the technology works
Collectly’s integration syncs patient balances, demographics, and payment activity between its cloud platform and Epic in real time. When a charge is posted in Epic, the system triggers a personalized communication sequence that can include text, email, voice calls, or mailed letters. The sequence adapts based on the patient’s insurance coverage, deductible status, and prior payment behavior.
At the heart of the workflow is Billie, an AI billing agent that operates 24/7 across chat, SMS, email, and voice channels. Billie can retrieve a patient’s account details, explain outstanding balances, and even process a payment or set up a payment plan—all without human intervention. According to Collectly, Billie has already resolved more than 475,000 billing inquiries, cutting support overhead by up to 85% for early adopters.
Why the announcement matters
The patient‑responsibility share of health‑care costs has risen from roughly 5% in 2010 to about 20% today, and analysts at McKinsey project it could reach 30% by 2030. As cost‑sharing climbs, providers lose an estimated 60 cents of every dollar owed to them due to manual follow‑up, bad‑debt write‑offs, and fragmented communication channels. The new integration gives health systems a turnkey way to plug that revenue leak without replacing Epic or building a separate billing stack.
Gartner predicts that by 2027, 70% of healthcare organizations will have deployed AI‑enabled revenue‑cycle tools, and the Collectly‑Epic partnership positions the company squarely within that wave. Moreover, Forrester estimates that AI‑driven payment automation can reduce the “cost to collect” by 30‑60%, a range echoed in McKinsey’s own projections for the broader financial‑services sector.
Industry impact and competitive context
Collectly is not the first fintech to target the health‑care revenue cycle, but its approach differs from traditional point‑solutions that sit outside the EHR. Competitors such as Waystar and Change Healthcare offer APIs that require extensive custom development and often duplicate data stores. Collectly’s bidirectional, Epic‑native plug‑in eliminates the need for parallel databases, reducing integration risk and compliance overhead.
The partnership also signals a broader trend of embedded finance platforms moving into regulated verticals. Just as Stripe and Square have embedded payment capabilities into e‑commerce and SaaS products, Collectly is embedding AI‑powered billing directly into the clinical workflow. This convergence blurs the line between health‑tech and fintech, creating new opportunities for cross‑industry collaboration with giants like Microsoft (Azure Cloud for health) and Salesforce (Health Cloud CRM).
Implications for enterprise marketing teams
For enterprise marketing teams that manage patient acquisition and retention, the integration opens a data‑rich channel for lifecycle communication. Because the system knows a patient’s balance, insurance status, and payment history, marketers can craft hyper‑targeted outreach—e.g., sending a reminder to a patient whose deductible is about to reset, or offering a short‑term financing option at the moment of care. The AI agent’s conversational interface also provides a brand‑consistent experience, reinforcing trust at a point where patients are most financially vulnerable.
Enterprise marketers can now measure the ROI of these interactions with the same granularity they apply to digital ad spend. The data can be fed back into predictive models that inform future outreach strategies, aligning with the broader move toward data‑driven patient engagement.
Subheadings
- A seamless bridge between Epic and fintech
- Billie: the AI agent that talks, texts, and takes money
- From pilot to production at scale
A seamless bridge between Epic and fintech
Collectly’s Connection Hub listing means health systems can enable the integration with a few clicks, preserving Epic’s single source of truth while extending its functionality into the payments domain.
Billie: the AI agent that talks, texts, and takes money
Billie’s multi‑modal presence allows patients to resolve billing questions on the channel they prefer, reducing call‑center volume and accelerating cash flow.
From pilot to production at scale
Early adopters like Howard Brown Health report higher collection rates and a two‑week reduction in time‑to‑collect, validating the model beyond sandbox environments.
Market Landscape
The convergence of digital payments, open banking, and embedded finance is reshaping how regulated industries handle cash flow. In the health‑care sector, the shift is driven by three forces:
- Rising patient cost‑sharing – Higher deductibles compel providers to engage directly with consumers on payments.
- AI‑enabled automation – Vendors are leveraging large language models and conversational AI to handle routine inquiries at scale.
- EHR‑centric integration – Health systems demand solutions that sit inside their existing Epic or Cerner environments to avoid data silos and compliance headaches.
Collectly’s Epic integration hits all three points, positioning it ahead of many niche billing vendors that still rely on batch uploads or manual reconciliation. The partnership also dovetails with Epic’s broader strategy to expand its marketplace of third‑party apps, a move reminiscent of Apple’s App Store model for consumer devices.
Top Insights
- Revenue‑cycle automation is becoming mainstream: Gartner forecasts 70% adoption of AI‑driven tools in health‑care by 2027, underscoring the urgency for providers to modernize billing.
- Bidirectional EHR integration cuts latency: Real‑time sync eliminates the “double‑entry” problem that plagues legacy fintech‑EHR pairings, accelerating payment capture by up to two weeks.
- AI agents can slash support costs: Collectly reports up to an 85% reduction in billing‑support overhead, echoing Forrester’s estimate of 30‑60% cost‑to‑collect savings.
- Embedded finance expands into regulated verticals: The Collectly‑Epic deal mirrors fintech’s broader push into sectors like insurance and education, where compliance and data integrity are paramount.
- Marketing teams gain a new ROI metric: Integration provides granular data on payment‑driven outreach, enabling marketers to tie communication spend directly to cash‑flow outcomes.
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