Unpaid patient balances shouldn’t linger in accounts receivable until they turn into bad debt. Once insurance pays its portion and internal billing stalls, a dedicated medical collection agency steps in so your staff can focus on patient care.
Collect911 recovers past-due medical and dental balances while protecting your practice’s reputation:
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Fixed-Fee Recovery ($15/account): Ideal for newer balances under 90 days. Professional demand letters direct patients to pay you directly—your practice keeps 100% of recovered funds.
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Contingency Collections: Performance-based recovery for older, unresponsive accounts. No recovery, no fee.
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HIPAA-Compliant & Diplomatic: Secure, relationship-preserving outreach that resolves balances without aggressive tactics or negative patient reviews.
Diplomatic communication consistently outperforms high-pressure collection tactics—recovering revenue while keeping patients in your practice.
Protecting your practice’s reputation, Collect911 holds licenses in all 50 states, ensuring a safe approach for every patient interaction. We provide free litigation and bankruptcy scrubs with zero onboarding or annual fees. Our SOC 2 Type II and HIPAA-compliant systems ensure total data security, backed by a 4.85/5 rating from over 2,000 professional reviews. Delivering high recovery rates!
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Tiered Medical Debt Recovery Workflow
Our Strategy for Debt Collection
Patients fear collection agencies—and for good reason. Most expect aggressive calls, threats to their credit, and lawsuits.
We take the opposite approach: dignity, respect, and clear options.
Forceful tactics do not work. Respectful communication does. That approach protects your practice’s reputation, reflected in our 4.85-star Google rating—with 90% of reviews written by the patients we collected from.
Three realities every practice faces with aging receivables:
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The 90-Day Cliff: After three billing cycles of non-payment, the chance of recovering that balance drops to near zero.
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Staff Burnout: Your team hates chasing overdue balances, and doing it without dedicated training leads to costly errors. Letting unpaid accounts sit means writing them off as a 100% loss.
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Compliance Landmines: Strict federal (FDCPA, HIPAA, Regulation F) and state laws govern medical collections. Collecting without expertise exposes your practice to expensive legal liability.
A professional agency turns write-offs into recovered revenue—without alienating your patients.
HIPAA and Data Security
As part of these federal mandates, debt collection agencies must keep debtors’ information private and secure. Data provided by doctors and hospitals can have personal information, including SSN, DOB, and other sensitive information. All “Personally Identifiable Information” must be protected from fraud, theft, and any other means of being public.
A reputable medical debt agency will know that they must sign a “HIPAA Business Associate Agreement” to agree that they will comply with HIPAA regulations.
Dealing with Insurance Companies
Medical debt collection agencies are not just about going after unpaid patient debt. Doctors often have a nightmare dealing with insurance companies and getting the claim processed in a timely manner.
Insurance companies are legally liable to respond within a few weeks after receiving a collection letter. A collection agency will not generally make phone calls to an insurance company.
Using the same skills they use to settle debts with patients amicably and professionally, these companies can assist doctors and back-end personnel with insurance follow-up.
Experienced medical debt collection agencies have even been known to expedite insurance claims than usual.
Frequently Asked Questions:
When should a doctor’s office send an unpaid patient balance to collections?
A physician practice should first make sure insurance has processed the claim, contractual adjustments have been posted, and the remaining amount is truly the patient’s responsibility. After statements and reasonable internal follow-up have failed, continuing to let the balance age can consume staff time without improving cash flow. Newer delinquent accounts may be suitable for Collect911’s $15 fixed-fee program, while older or difficult accounts can be moved to contingency collections.
Should an insurance-denied medical claim be sent to patient collections?
Not automatically. Before treating a denied claim as patient debt, the practice should review the insurer’s Explanation of Benefits or remittance information, determine why the claim was denied, and establish whether the balance is actually the patient’s responsibility. Coding errors, eligibility issues, prior authorization problems, or appealable insurance denials may need to be resolved with the payer first. Only a properly established patient-responsibility balance should move through the patient collection process.
Can a doctor send a patient’s medical bill to a collection agency without violating HIPAA?
Yes. HIPAA permits healthcare providers to use collection agencies for payment activities. When the collection company functions as the provider’s business associate, appropriate HIPAA requirements apply, including a Business Associate Agreement and safeguards for protected health information. Information shared for collection purposes should also be limited to what is reasonably necessary to perform the collection activity.
What patient information can a doctor’s office give to a medical collection agency?
A physician practice may provide information reasonably necessary to identify the patient, establish the balance, and pursue payment, subject to HIPAA’s applicable requirements. Practices should avoid transferring unnecessary clinical information simply because it exists in the medical record. A HIPAA-compliant collection workflow should follow the minimum-necessary standard and appropriate data-security safeguards.
Can a doctor send a disputed medical bill to collections while a No Surprises Act dispute is pending?
For a bill that qualifies for the federal Patient-Provider Dispute Resolution process, the provider cannot move the disputed bill into collections or threaten collection while that dispute is pending. If the account was already in collections when the dispute began, collection activity on that bill must stop until the dispute is resolved. Practices should therefore identify qualifying billing disputes before escalating an account to collections.
Can a medical collection agency contact a spouse, parent, or guarantor about a doctor’s bill?
In certain circumstances, yes. HIPAA permits a healthcare provider or its collection agency to communicate with another person when reasonably necessary to obtain payment for healthcare services. However, disclosures must still comply with applicable privacy requirements, including limiting protected health information to what is reasonably necessary and honoring applicable confidential-communication restrictions. The responsible party or guarantor information in the practice’s records should therefore be accurate before an account is submitted.
Simple Pricing for Medical Collections
- Fixed fee service – $15 per accunt
- Contingency fee service – 40% of amount collected.
- No hidden or onboarding fee.
Recent Recovery Results for Physician Practices:
Primary Care Practice — Fixed Fee — 72% Recovered
A multi-provider primary care practice placed $14,850 in unpaid patient-responsibility balances after insurance had processed the claims and routine billing follow-up was complete.
The newer accounts were submitted through Collect911’s $15 fixed-fee program.
Recovered: $10,692 — 72% recovery rate
The physician practice retained 100% of payments made directly to the practice.
Orthopedic Practice — Fixed Fee + Contingency — 61% Recovered
An orthopedic group submitted $32,700 in patient accounts, including deductibles, coinsurance balances, and older accounts that had stopped responding to internal statements.
Newer accounts entered the fixed-fee program, while older and more difficult balances were escalated to contingency collections.
Recovered: $19,947 — 61% recovery rate
Using two recovery stages allowed the practice to keep costs low on fresher accounts while applying more intensive recovery efforts to aging balances.
Specialty Physician Group — Contingency — 47% Recovered
A specialty medical group placed $41,500 in older patient balances after its billing staff had exhausted normal follow-up efforts.
The accounts were submitted to Collect911’s contingency collection program, with no collection fee on amounts that were not recovered.
Recovered: $19,505 — 47% recovery rate
Even though these balances were significantly aged, nearly half of the referred receivables were successfully recovered.
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