Collectly acquires Pledge Health and accelerates AI automation in the patient financial journey
Collectly just announced the acquisition of Pledge Health, and this move promises to significantly change how clinics and hospitals handle the financial side of things before the patient even walks through the door.
If you work with health tech or follow how AI is advancing in sectors that still rely heavily on manual processes, this news deserves your attention. 👀
Collectly was already well known for streamlining the patient experience on the financial side, with a platform integrated into more than 20 electronic health record systems and over 3,000 healthcare facilities trusting its solution. With Pledge Health coming on board, the company takes a major step toward full automation of everything that happens before the appointment — from coverage verification to upfront payment collection.
The core idea is simple: less manual work for administrative teams and more financial clarity for anyone scheduling an appointment. The result of this merger could redefine what we call the patient financial journey in healthcare. 🏥
What Pledge Health brings to the Collectly ecosystem
Pledge Health is no ordinary company. It was built with a specific focus on the processes that happen before the appointment — the so-called pre-service revenue cycle. In practice, that means insurance eligibility verification, copay estimation, prior authorization, and of course, payment collection before the patient even sits down in the waiting room.
These are steps that, when done manually, eat up hours of administrative staff time and still produce errors that directly impact billing at healthcare facilities. With Pledge Health technology, all of this becomes automated and integrated into Collectly‘s existing workflow.
What makes this acquisition even more relevant is that Pledge Health entered the market with an AI-driven approach from day one. The platform includes a visual AI agent builder that lets teams automate essential pre-service financial workflows using API connections and browser automation — designed to work reliably without depending on fragile screen-scraping-based RPA.
The platform’s algorithms can cross-reference coverage data, payment history, and payer-specific rules to generate accurate financial estimates for the patient well in advance. This eliminates that classic and frustrating scenario where someone only finds out how much they owe after the appointment has already happened. For clinics, it means less bad debt and more cash flow predictability. For the patient, it means transparency and trust in the process — two factors that weigh heavily on the overall patient experience.
When you combine Pledge Health‘s predictive capability with Collectly‘s already established automation infrastructure, what emerges is a platform capable of covering virtually the entire financial journey of a healthcare facility — from the patient’s first point of contact to the final account closure. That is very different from what most solutions on the market offer today, which still operate in separate silos for each step of the process. Integrating these two technologies under one roof represents a considerable leap in operational efficiency for any clinic or hospital that adopts the combined solution.
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The financial workflows that are now being automated
To understand the full impact of this acquisition, it helps to break down the specific processes that the Collectly + Pledge Health combination can automate. These are those daily pre-visit steps that determine whether a patient arrives financially informed and prepared — resulting in cleaner billing, more accurate upfront collections, and the ability to scale operations without having to hire more administrative staff:
- Coverage and benefits verification — the system runs eligibility checks, retrieves important benefit details from clearinghouses and payer portals, and flags missing or conflicting information before the appointment
- Insurance data capture and cleanup — collects missing member and plan data, improves data quality, and reduces rework caused by insurance cards with incorrect information
- Pre-registration and patient intake completion — handles form completion, demographics, guarantor information, and consent forms, with automated reminders to finish anything left pending
- Network validation and plan routing — confirms whether the provider is in-network, handles out-of-network scenarios, and routes exceptions to the right team
- Pre-service cost estimates — generates financial estimates, validates assumptions, and updates when there are changes to procedure codes, coverage, or scheduling
- Financial clearance orchestration — turns standard operating procedures into automated steps: verify, decide, route, and document
- Prior authorization preparation — identifies when authorizations are needed, gathers requirements, submits the request, and tracks status
- Upfront collections and deposits — sends payment links, collects copays and deposits, and reconciles outstanding balances before the visit
- Payment plan and financing setup — offers options to the patient, captures consent, sets schedules, and confirms enrollment before the appointment
- Patient communication and follow-up — multi-channel reminders plus status updates along the lines of what is still needed before your appointment to reduce no-shows and surprises
Each of these items represents a real pain point for anyone working in healthcare financial management. The difference now is that they stop being manual, fragmented processes and become intelligent, connected, automated workflows within a single platform. 🔄
End-to-end automation: what this means in practice
When we talk about automation in the healthcare context, it is easy to fall into the trap of imagining just bots answering messages or forms being filled out automatically. But what Collectly is building goes well beyond that. The combination with Pledge Health creates an ecosystem where every step of the financial cycle — from scheduling the appointment to the final payment — is managed intelligently, with minimal human intervention and maximum data accuracy.
This directly impacts the productivity of administrative teams, who currently spend a huge chunk of their day on repetitive tasks that could be resolved in seconds by a well-calibrated system.
In practice, a patient who schedules an appointment at a clinic using this combined solution automatically receives an estimate of how much they will need to pay before they even arrive at the office. The system verifies the insurance plan in real time, calculates the copay based on payer rules, and sends that information in a clear, accessible way — whether by SMS, email, or app. If there is any outstanding financial balance from previous visits, the system flags that too and makes it easy to pay in just a few steps.
All of this payment collection happens seamlessly, without the patient having to go through awkward moments at the front desk or the staff having to bring up the subject in an uncomfortable way. 💬
For clinics with high patient volumes, the gains are even more significant. With over 3,000 healthcare facilities already on Collectly‘s platform and integration with more than 20 electronic health record systems, the scale this solution can reach is substantial. Each facility that moves to the automated workflow starts operating with cleaner data, more predictable billing, and an administrative team that can focus on tasks that actually require human judgment — instead of spending the day manually checking coverage or calling patients about outstanding balances.
This is the kind of operational gain that transforms how a mid-sized clinic is managed, and it can be even more transformative for hospital networks with multiple locations.
What the leaders of both companies are saying about the acquisition
Levon Brutyan, CEO and co-founder of Collectly, highlighted that the company is building the patient financial experience system, where the pre-service journey can be automated and personalized in real time. According to him, Pledge Health brings a workflow-oriented AI agent builder that expands what Collectly can automate in financial clearance — covering everything from coverage verification and estimates to approvals and payment setup, without forcing teams to navigate a maze of portals, queues, and manual follow-ups.
Shreya Jagarlamudi, co-founder of Pledge Health, explained that the company was created to automate the hardest, most manual parts of pre-service financial workflows — especially where APIs do not exist and teams are forced to rely on payer portals and improvised workarounds. By joining Collectly, Pledge Health‘s capabilities can be scaled within a platform that already owns the end-to-end patient financial experience, helping healthcare providers execute these workflows with far less manual effort and uncertainty.
These statements reveal a shared vision between the two companies: that the future of financial management in healthcare runs through intelligent, integrated automation — not fragmented solutions that only solve one piece of the puzzle. 🎯
What Collectly expects to achieve with the acquisition
With the integration of Pledge Health, Collectly has set clear expectations for how this combination will impact its offering:
- Expand the scope of pre-service workflows the platform can execute, enabling automation across more patient experience processes on the financial side
- Increase the depth of automation for patient access and financial counseling teams, reducing manual follow-ups and repetitive steps that drain time and resources
- Evolve the way Collectly delivers value, moving from feature-by-feature automation to an outcome-driven approach where the promise is: we run this entire workflow for you
This paradigm shift is particularly significant. Instead of offering isolated tools that teams need to configure and manage, Collectly is moving toward a model where complete workflows are delivered as an automated service. This drastically reduces the learning curve and implementation time for new healthcare facilities.
The direct impact on the patient experience
It is impossible to talk about this acquisition without highlighting what it means for the person on the other side of the counter. The patient experience on the financial side has historically been one of the most frustrating aspects of the healthcare industry. Surprise charges, difficulty understanding what the plan covers or does not cover, confusing and barely digital payment processes — these are common complaints that anyone who has ever used health insurance knows all too well.
It is no exaggeration to say that this financial friction directly affects how a patient perceives the overall quality of care, even when the clinical side was excellent.
Collectly‘s proposition with the Pledge Health integration targets exactly this point. When a patient receives a clear upfront estimate of what they will pay, has easy access to payment options, and goes through payment collection in a digital, frictionless way, their perception of the entire experience changes. They arrive calmer, without the anxiety of not knowing how much is coming out of their pocket. And when the financial process is transparent and well communicated, default rates tend to drop — which is good for both the patient and the clinic. It is one of those situations where well-applied technology creates value for all sides of the process at the same time.
Another important point is that this improvement in the patient experience does not require the patient to install a specific app or learn how to use a new platform. Communication can happen through the channels they already use daily, like SMS and email, with clear, straightforward messages. This is key to ensuring the positive impact reaches all patient profiles, not just the most digitally connected ones.
Automation here serves precisely to make the process more human in terms of communication, because the administrative team no longer needs to be the middleman for information that the system can deliver far more efficiently and at exactly the right time. 📱
Continuity for healthcare organizations that are already clients
For healthcare organizations facing staffing constraints and growing complexity in pre-service processes, the combined platform was designed to raise the level of automation without sacrificing the patient-centered experience and EHR-connected interoperability these organizations already rely on every day.
This means clinics and hospitals that are already Collectly clients will not need to migrate to a new system or go through a painful reimplementation process. Pledge Health‘s technology will be incorporated into the existing platform, adding new capabilities without breaking what already works. This kind of care with the transition is critical in healthcare, where any system disruption can directly impact appointment flow and operational revenue.
About Collectly
Collectly is an AI-powered technology company specializing in patient billing, revenue cycle management, and engagement solutions. Integrated with more than 20 leading electronic health record systems, the company helps healthcare organizations streamline financial workflows, accelerate cash flow, reduce the cost of collections, and deliver a modern, patient-friendly billing experience. It is already trusted by more than 3,000 healthcare facilities and has processed over 1 billion dollars in patient payments.
About Pledge Health
Pledge Health is an AI-powered automation platform that helps healthcare practices reduce repetitive administrative work in revenue cycle management workflows, enabling teams to spend less time chasing information and more time helping patients understand and afford their care.
The acquisition of Pledge Health by Collectly is a clear signal that AI-driven automation in healthcare is moving beyond medical records and diagnostics. The financial cycle, which for a long time lagged behind in terms of innovation, is starting to receive the same level of technological attention that other areas of the industry have been getting for years.
For anyone following this market closely, it is worth keeping an eye on how this combined platform evolves over the coming months. The installed base is already large, the technology is mature, and the problem they solve is real and urgent for thousands of healthcare facilities. 🚀
