Cedar, a patient financial platform for healthcare providers, launched an agentic artificial intelligence platform Thursday aimed at patient medical billing.
Kora Platform is a suite of purpose-built AI agents that integrates with healthcare organizations’ existing electronic health records (EHRs), telephony and call center systems. Some of the capabilities included within the suite include autonomous inbound voice, autonomous outbound voice, two-way text and advanced reporting.
“We really want Kora Platform to be this agentic advocate that's sitting in the pocket of every patient,” Cedar Chief Strategy Officer Dugan Winkie told Fierce Healthcare.
Kora Platform adapts in real time to predict a patient’s needs and trigger the optimal next financial action, the company said. It also remembers past conversations with patients. By carrying context across conversations, patients do not need to start from scratch when calling in.
Winkie said “difficult-to-collect patient archetypes are growing rapidly,” citing changes from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) as a factor. Cedar has also seen “about a 40% increase in uninsured self-pay dollars,” with options for navigating billing becoming “increasingly complicated,” according to Winkie.
“Oftentimes the onus is put on the patient to self-navigate this journey,” Winkie said. “So what we really want to do is flip that paradigm a bit.”
Cedar debuted Kora in April 2025. The AI agent is available 24/7 to autonomously resolve common billing inquiries on the first interaction and is trained on the platform’s proprietary healthcare billing data.Â
Winkie said Cedar has processed 1.5 billion individual payments across 50 million “unique financial journeys.” “I would almost think of this as a patient behavior ledger that has really driven and fueled our personalization engine,” he said.
Kora’s automated inbound calling has handled more than 600,000 patient conversations and achieved a 40% inbound call containment rate, executives say. The platform has also achieved a 20% pickup rate for outbound calls, which the company says is 4x the industry average.
Moreover, Kora sees a 21% relative payment rate within seven days of outreach.
“We're at about a 4 out of 5 on post-call patient satisfaction,” Winkie said. “So I think we're getting good indications that this is a positive empathetic experience for patients.”
New agentic workflows are actively being deployed within the platform, the company says. Winkie said Cedar will develop workflows “hand-in-hand with our customers and our innovation partners.”
“It may result in Kora doing some RC- adjacent outbound engagement,” Winkie said. “It may also involve moving upstream.”