Like many founders in healthcare technology, our starting point was personal: we had our own frustrating experiences as patients trying to understand medical bills. But what stood out to us was that the problem wasn’t just billing — it was communication.
Providers often struggled to clearly explain costs and insurance coverage at the front desk. Patient statements were largely one-way communication, sent outbound with no easy way to ask questions or resolve confusion. And if patients did try to call for help, support centers were often difficult to reach and rarely able to provide clear answers.
At the same time, patient responsibility has grown dramatically — in many cases representing up to 30% of a provider’s revenue. Yet many organizations were still relying on manual, paper-based billing processes that delayed payments, increased write-offs, and created administrative burden.
We founded Inbox Health to approach patient billing as a communication platform rather than just a payment problem — making it easier for providers to clearly explain balances, answer questions, and help patients resolve bills quickly and confidently.
Over the past decade, we’ve become the dominant patient billing platform in the third-party billing and RCM market. That position came from solving a very specific problem early on: patient billing in ambulatory care sits across dozens of EHR and practice management systems. Making it work well required deep integrations and years of optimization across those workflows.
Many patient billing vendors operate one step removed from the operational systems, working primarily off statement files or batch data exports. We took a different approach and invested heavily in direct integrations across the ambulatory ecosystem. That allowed us to understand how patient billing actually behaves across different specialties, payer mixes, and operational models, and to design workflows that improve both patient outcomes and staff efficiency.
In the last three years, we’ve shifted our focus from outsourced billing companies to mid-size and large provider groups that face many of the same complexities as RCM firms — multiple systems, high patient responsibility balances, and growing pressure to improve the patient experience while maintaining operational efficiency.
Across both segments, our advantage comes from combining data-driven outbound billing communications with a best-in-class patient support experience. The result is that providers collect more, faster, without adding work for their teams. On average, our customers see a 20% increase in patient revenue, collect 5× faster, cut time spent on patient A/R in half, and maintain a 96% patient satisfaction rate.
Over the next 12 months, we’re focused on two areas where we believe the industry is about to change meaningfully: card on file and AI-driven patient support.
On card on file, the industry has traditionally treated it as a front-desk policy. We think it’s actually a patient engagement workflow that spans the entire visit lifecycle. Our focus is on optimizing three key interaction points where patients are most receptive: pre-visit, in the office, and post-visit during digital checkout. The goal is to make it seamless for providers to capture payment methods and enable autopay without mandating it or creating patient friction.
That foundation enables a more intelligent post-visit billing workflow that recognizes the financial realities patients face. Instead of treating every balance the same way, we dynamically offer payment plans and financing options that meet patients where they are.
The second focus area is AI-driven patient interaction. Many of the questions patients ask practices — whether about bills, balances, insurance, or basic administrative issues — are repetitive but time-consuming for staff. Our goal is to enable providers to handle these interactions instantly across phone, text, email, and real-time chat, while allowing the AI to take action such as processing payments or setting up payment plans. We’re also focused on bringing real-time chat more deeply into the provider workflow by integrating it directly with billing and EHR systems, giving patients faster answers while reducing administrative burden for practices.