At Gastro Health, Kora has cut live agent handle time by 24% and call center staffing by 22% since going live.

NEW YORK, June 15, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — One year after introducing Kora, Cedar’s AI agent for healthcare billing, the patient financial engagement company today announced that Kora has handled nearly 400,000 patient calls, has been adopted by ten provider organizations including Epic and Cerner health systems, enterprise physician staffing groups, and large speciality medicine groups. Kora has also expanded across a growing library of revenue cycle use cases — from balance inquiries and insurance capture to outbound calling and Spanish-language support.

When Cedar launched Kora in April 2025, the goal was to automate 30% of inbound billing calls. One year later, the focus is on expanding Kora’s capabilities to new areas like outbound patient engagement and agentic workflow automation

At Gastro Health — one of the country’s largest gastroenterology practices, with more than 120 locations across seven states — Kora went live in September 2025 and has since handled more than 60,000 calls. Live agent handle time is down 24%. Call center staffing, also supported by Cedar, is down 22%. More than 80% of patients who filled out a post-call survey indicate they were highly satisfied by Kora’s support, a rate that is above high-performing live agent teams.

“The phones are the biggest detriment to growth and patient satisfaction,” said Lawrence Freni, Chief Financial Officer of Gastro Health. “You have teammates taking a lot of calls and trying to be patient-focused while the phones keep ringing. Kora is making a real difference, in both our cash flow and our patient satisfaction. That’s how you build a sustainable growth engine.”

Since launch, more than a dozen providers have brought Kora into their call centers, including Hartford HealthCare, Keck Medicine of USC, Gastro Health, ApolloMD, and Emerus. At ApolloMD — Cedar’s original Kora partner and a national emergency medicine, anesthesiology, and hospital medicine group — adopting Cedar’s patient financial platform contributed to a 42% increase in patient payments alongside measurable reductions in live agent workload.

Kora’s expanded library of live use cases now includes:

• Patient Authentication: Authenticating the caller using HIPAA-compliant protocols.
• Bill in Collections: Advising patients on how to inquire about a bill that has been sent to collections.
• Balance Inquiries: Informing patients about their outstanding balance.
• Insurance Capture: Capturing details about new or updated insurance from patients.
• Explain My Bill: Explaining in clear detail why a patient has an outstanding balance, what insurance was applied, and what options they have to resolve it.
• Outbound Collections Campaigns: Proactive outreach to patients with outstanding balances to collect payment.
• Spanish Language Support: Spanish-language calling across all use cases to improve accessibility and resolution.

“We have heard enough about AI promises,” said Florian Otto, CEO and Co-Founder of Cedar. “The question is no longer whether the technology can hold a conversation. It is whether it can earn the trust of a patient asking why their bill does not match the EOB they received from their payer. After nearly 400,000 calls, the answer is yes — and we are using that proof to push deeper into the work that has historically been the hardest to staff and the most expensive to scale.”

These additions push Kora past triage and into resolution – areas where staffing shortages, call abandonment, and avoidable denials have quietly compounded for years. With contact centers reporting widespread staffing shortages and labor consuming roughly 60% of hospital expenses, leaving these workflows to manual queues continues to grow more costly.

Kora is powered by Cedar Intelligence, Cedar’s AI decision engine for patient financial engagement, and is purpose-built for healthcare billing. It is HIPAA-compliant, trained on more than a billion patient interactions, and capable of escalating to a live agent with full context whenever human judgment is required.

The first year of Kora was about proving that agentic AI could meet patients in one of the most charged moments of their care — the bill. The next year is about how much further into the revenue cycle it can go.

About Cedar

Cedar is the performance engine for healthcare financial experience, built on AI to solve the growing complexity of patient financial engagement and deliver personalization at scale. Powered by more than a billion patient interactions, Cedar’s platform unifies billing, payments, coverage, and support into a single solution that continuously learns and adapts — driving stronger results for providers and simpler, more empathetic, and personalized financial journeys for patients. By connecting over 200+ healthcare and financial partners, Cedar reduces administrative burden, improves margins, and helps patients access the coverage, aid, and payment options they need with confidence. To date, Cedar has supported more than 50 million patients nationwide and processed over $10 billion in payments.

Media Contact

Cedar@solcomms.co

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SOURCE Cedar