Patient balance recovery for independent healthcare practices
A clear alternative to sending patients to collections.
DueWell is a patient balance recovery platform your billing team uses before sending accounts to a collection agency.
Patients hear from your practice and pay your practice directly. You decide which accounts to work and when to refer them to an agency.
Monthly platform fee + success fee on qualifying aged recoveries. See terms →
We can work with your team on EMR or RIS integration where your vendor supports it and your practice authorizes access.
Start with $100,000 unpaid.
The same unpaid balances, 91–120 days old, enter two alternative paths.
DueWell platform
Observed recovery rateSelected for follow-up by the practice.
Collection agency
Assumed recovery rate$100,000 was placed with the collection agency.
DueWell recovery rate: single founder-affiliated imaging practice, observational, no control group. Agency recovery and fee are assumptions. Grow plan: $1,000/month for three months + 10% of recovered cash. Setup waiver assumed; excludes overages, processing, refunds, staff time and additional services.
Scroll to follow ↓View the comparison as a table
DueWell recovery rate: single founder-affiliated imaging practice, observational, no control group. Agency recovery and fee are assumptions. Grow plan: $1,000/month for three months + 10% of recovered cash. Setup waiver assumed; excludes overages, processing, refunds, staff time and additional services.
| Measure | DueWell platform | Agency estimate |
|---|---|---|
| Placed | $100,000 | $100,000 |
| Recovered | $46,900 | $20,000 |
| Fees shown | $7,690 | $6,000 |
| Practice keeps | $39,210 | $14,000 |
- Our focus
- 60–180
- days at placement
- Your workflow
- Your ledger
- import and posting scoped together
- The measure
- Net cash
- alongside staff effort and patient experience
In 72 seconds
What DueWell does, in one sitting.
The hand-off, the alternative, the patient’s side of it, the recovery illustration and Grow plan fees. Narrated, captioned, no sales call required.
Trouble playing? Open the MP4 or try the alternate video. Read the transcript.
The message goes out as the practice. The money comes back to the practice.
One aged balance, start to finish, from a message to a payment. DueWell is beside the line, never on it: its fee is invoiced afterwards, and it never holds the payment.
The 15-day figure is the median from first message to cash at the founding practice, March to August 2026. Single site, observational, no control group.
What your patients see. What your staff sees.
The 72-second overview, then the two sides of a single aged balance: the patient’s phone and the practice’s queue.
The patient’s side
A text or email from the practice’s own number: the amount, the visit it was for, and a link to a statement under the practice’s name.
The statement page has a pay button and a plan option. No account to create, no callback to wait for.
Reply STOP and every channel stops. Call the number back and it rings the practice.
The practice’s side
Placement is the aging report you already produce; balances 60+ days old at placement are all DueWell works.
Routine replies are answered automatically. What needs a human lands in a triage queue as a one-tap decision with the recommended answer pre-selected.
The monthly statement shows the account-level detail behind every fee, so the meter is the ledger.
Illustrative walkthrough of the product as described on the How it works page; not a live screen.
The full walkthrough, with security and onboarding →The statements went out. The balance is still there.
Your team has already billed insurance and sent patient statements. DueWell focuses on the unresolved patient balances that remain, before you decide what to send to an agency or write off.
Sources: KFF / Peterson-KFF Health System Tracker (medical debt owed); CFPB, Medical Debt Burden in the United States (debt in collections); Kodiak Solutions Benchmarking Intelligence, March 2026 (revenue loss, patient share, collection rate; hospital and health-system data); MGMA DataDive (receivables over 120 days); HFMA benchmarks. Collectability-by-age figures are RCM trade rules of thumb.
What changes when the provider keeps the account.
Keep control of how patients hear from your practice, which payment options they receive and when a question needs your billing team. Compare that workflow with your current follow-up and agency process.
| Dimension | DueWell — first-party | Collection agency — third-party |
|---|---|---|
| Who the patient hears from | Their doctor’s office. Same name, same number, same tone as the visit. | A stranger. A different company name on the letter and caller ID. |
| When it starts | Day 60, while the balance is still fresh and the patient still remembers the visit. | Day 90–180, after the account has already gone cold. |
| What it collects | Roughly 30–60% of aged dollars, bucket-dependent, within 90–180 days. | ~17–21% of placed medical debt, over the life of the placement. |
| What it costs | Monthly platform fee + a plan-specific success fee on qualifying aged cash recovered. | 25–40% of whatever it recovers. |
| The provider nets | Recovered cash less the selected plan’s fees and applicable usage. See the calculator for your book. | Recovered cash less the agency’s contingency fee. |
| Leverage | Convenience — text-to-pay, plans, card-on-file, a portal — and the relationship. | Historically, the threat of a credit report. That lever is largely gone. |
| The relationship | Intact. The patient paid the practice. | Damaged. The patient was sent to collections by the practice. |
Performance figures are single-site results from a founder-affiliated diagnostic imaging practice; observational data, no control group. Agency benchmarks: ACA International recovery data as reproduced in trade sources; contingency ranges are industry-standard.
What changed when one practice switched from its prior vendor.
March–August 2026 on DueWell against the same six months a year earlier on the vendor it replaced — same practice, same cash-event rules applied to both ledgers.
Patient cash per month
View as table
| Month | Prior vendor 2025 | DueWell 2026 | Paying patients 2025 | Paying patients 2026 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mar | $93,451 | $168,404 | 597 | 931 |
| Apr | $96,185 | $157,017 | 618 | 932 |
| May | $77,112 | $136,834 | 556 | 777 |
| Jun | $71,204 | $134,514 | 487 | 821 |
| Jul | $76,511 | $131,698 | 532 | 854 |
| Aug | $67,786 | $130,669 | 522 | 777 |
| Six months | $482,249 | $859,136 | 3,312 | 5,092 |
Recovery by age of balance, both platforms
View as table
| Age at engagement | Prior vendor | DueWell | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| 31–60 days | 55.2% | 81.3% | 26.1 pts |
| 61–90 days | 47.6% | 62.8% | 15.2 pts |
| 91–120 days | 26.8% | 46.9% | 20.1 pts |
| 121–180 days | 30.9% | 29.3% | -1.6 pts |
Measured from the date of service, DueWell’s time to cash is longer than the prior vendor’s — it recovers balances six to twenty-four months old that the prior vendor never worked. The clock that isolates the platform is first message to cash: 15 days.
Founder-affiliated diagnostic imaging practice, single site. Platform: production ledger, read-only extraction, data as of Sep 20, 2026. Prior vendor: its raw account export through Dec 2025, recomputed under the same cash-event rules and reconciled to its published lifetime card cash ($1,135,069). The platform's days from date of service to cash are longer than the prior vendor's because it works far older balances. The cash increase cannot be separated from placement volume or deductible mix using collections data alone. Observational, no control group.
Performance figures are single-site results from a founder-affiliated diagnostic imaging practice; observational data, no control group. Agency benchmarks: ACA International recovery data as reproduced in trade sources; contingency ranges are industry-standard.
Recovery by age of balance, with method and sources →A recovery workflow that fits your billing operation.
- 1
Takes the aged book
Balances 60+ days old at placement, pulled from the provider’s own billing system. Age is measured at placement — not at payment — so a slow payer never drifts into fee scope.
- 2
Works it as the provider
Text and email outreach that reads and sounds like the practice, not a collector. Payment plans, card-on-file, a patient portal, and consent handling that respects every stop request.
- 3
Makes the fee auditable
A monthly platform fee plus the chosen plan’s success fee on qualifying cash recovered on aged accounts, invoiced in arrears. The success fee applies to balances aged 60+ days at placement, with refunds and chargebacks credited under the agreed terms.
Payments settle to your own merchant account and bank. DueWell never holds, receives, or disburses client or patient funds. Read the full walkthrough →
A defined book. A clear comparison. A decision based on results.
For independent healthcare practices that control patient billing and can export and reconcile their balances. We agree the scope, responsibilities and economics before outreach begins.
- 01
Check the fit
Review your billing system, balance totals by age, existing follow-up and who owns reconciliation. Aggregate totals are enough for the first conversation.
- 02
Agree the comparison
Define eligible accounts, observation windows and a comparison with your usual process. Coordinate outreach so patients receive one clear workflow.
- 03
Measure what matters
Review net recovered cash, staff effort, payment reconciliation and patient experience. Discuss the ongoing paid arrangement before starting.
First-party changes who’s speaking. It doesn’t change the rules — so we built them in.
Consent that already exists
A patient who gave the practice their number at intake consented to be contacted about that visit's balance. The provider holds that consent; an agency has to inherit it. DueWell records consent per patient, per channel, with its source and date — and contacts nobody by default.
Every stop honored, everywhere
A STOP by text, a request on a call, or a note to the front desk revokes consent across every channel at once, with an audit trail — built ahead of the FCC's 2027 revoke-all rule, not after it.
Built for the AI-voice rules
DueWell will use AI voice for patient follow-up in your practice’s name. The FCC treats AI voices as “artificial” under the TCPA, and California requires disclosure. The voice agent dials only patients with explicit voice consent, says what it is, verifies date of birth before it says a balance, and never takes a card.
The doctor's office, not a debt collector
Messages come from the practice, in its name and its tone. The federal debt-collector script doesn't attach to a provider collecting its own balances — but frequency, hours, and content are held to collector standards anyway, because California applies them to creditors too.
Never on a credit report
DueWell does not furnish anything to a credit bureau. In California that is now the law; everywhere else it is what keeps the patient relationship intact.
HIPAA by design
Each client runs in its own deployment under its own BAA. Billing outreach is a permitted payment use; no patient identifiers travel to the payment processor; every access is logged.
The ones practices ask first.
What counts toward the success fee?
Only patient-paid cash allocated to eligible balances that were at least 60 days old when placed with DueWell, measured from the first patient statement. The percentage applies to cash received, not the original balance, written-off amounts or patient processing fees. Refunds and chargebacks are credited under your agreed terms.
What happens if no qualifying cash comes in?
The monthly platform fee still applies, plus any usage over the allowance. There is no success fee in a month with no qualifying recovered cash.
Do you hold our money?
No. Patients pay your practice through its own merchant account. DueWell invoices its fees separately, monthly in arrears for success fees, net 15. Payment processing charges are separate.
What does routine support include?
Help configuring and using the platform, troubleshooting and reviewing your workflow. Your billing team handles patient questions, disputes, hardship decisions and write-offs. DueWell staff working those queues is a separately scoped managed service.
Let’s look at your unresolved patient balances.
Bring aggregate totals by age and the name of your billing system. We’ll discuss fit, implementation and how to measure a pilot. No patient data needed.