Pretty Good AI vs Collectly

One is a billing product. One is an operation.

Collectly and Pretty Good AI both touch the money. That is where the similarity stops, and the difference is worth getting straight before you sit through two demos that look alike on a slide.

Collectly sells the patient financial journey. Intake and check-in, eligibility, a cost estimate before the visit, the copay at the desk, the statement after, the follow-up on the statement, and a payments platform under all of it. It works with any EHR, and it publishes support for more than twenty of them. Its buyer is usually the person who owns revenue cycle.

We sell the operation around athenaOne. The phone, the texts, the referrals, the schedule, the staff queues, the authorizations and the balances, run as one thing on one integration. The balance work is one of four pillars, not the product.

They are different purchases, and practices get into trouble when they treat them as the same one.

The balance is not where the balance problem starts

Here is what we see in athenaOne practices, and it is not a billing finding.

A patient calls about a bill. The call goes unanswered because the front desk is on three other lines, so the patient does not pay that day. They call again on Thursday, get through, and ask a question the person who answered cannot resolve without pulling up a second system. The balance ages another two weeks.

Meanwhile, the same patient had a visit scheduled last month that nobody confirmed, and an eligibility check that failed on a Monday and nobody noticed. The balance that shows up in your aging report was created by three operational failures upstream, and only one of them looks like billing.

Statements and payment plans work on the balance after it exists. They are necessary and they are not the whole job.

What we actually run

We are the AI operations platform for athenaOne practices, and the four pillars run on one integration and one patient memory.

Patient engagement. We answer the phone day and night, and we handle secure two-way text on the same integration. Patients book, reschedule, ask for a refill, ask what they owe, or ask a question and get an answer. We reach out too: confirmations that catch a cancellation days early, recalls, open slots to fill, and surveys and review requests after the visit.

Task automation. Cases, orders, requests and the outreach attached to them. You choose the tasks and set the rules. We run the steps and track what is moving, waiting or stuck, and staff work from an athenaOne inbox rather than a separate queue nobody checks.

Referral management. Referrals arrive by fax, by web form and by phone. We chart them, chase what is missing, reach the patient and book the first visit, and show the whole pipeline in one place with the stalled ones surfaced.

Revenue cycle. Prior-auth prep customized by payer, status pulled from payer portals and written back into athenaOne so staff read it in the chart, balances worked inbound and outbound, the balance surfaced before scheduling so the conversation happens before the visit, payment taken by secure link during the call, and a combined family balance so the front desk can collect for the household in one conversation.

Then the layer none of it works without. We combine your athenaOne data with the results of every call, message and task we handle, and use it to see where patients get stuck and where provider time goes unused.

Cost estimation, stated plainly

Collectly publishes pre-service price estimation as a named product with Good Faith Estimates attached. Cost estimation and Good Faith Estimates are not workflows we run today, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.

What we would push back on is the assumption that it is the biggest number on your board. For most athenaOne practices it is not. The bigger numbers are the calls nobody picked up, the referrals sitting past day seven, the slots that went out empty, and the authorizations that slipped past the procedure date. Those are visits that did not happen, and a visit that did not happen never generates a balance to collect in the first place.

Count both before you decide. One of them is usually an order of magnitude larger than the other, and it is rarely the one already on the revenue cycle agenda.

Depth is why the work finishes

A lot of tools connect to athenaOne. Far fewer finish work inside it.

Posting a payment or pushing a statement touches a handful of endpoints. Resolving a failed eligibility check, prepping an authorization by payer, completing a stalled referral or working a balance that has sat since July touches far more of the system, and every gap turns into a task for a human.

We hold production read and write access to 820+ athenaOne APIs, with no middleware in between, and our app runs inside athenaOne with no extra login. That is the difference between a workflow that ends in the chart and a workflow that ends in somebody’s to-do list.

It is also the reason we only do athenaOne. Building to the full capability of one system and building to the common ground of twenty are different products, and we picked the first one.

What this looks like in a real practice

Picture a six-site multi-specialty group, about ninety providers, and a central business office of nine people handling billing calls for all of it.

The billing office has a real problem and everybody knows it. Accounts receivable over 90 days keeps climbing, the statements go out, and the inbound line that is supposed to catch the questions rolls to voicemail most afternoons. A patient financial engagement platform is on the shortlist.

Here is the part the shortlist misses. Pull the call logs and roughly one in five inbound calls to the business office never got picked up in the busy hour. Those patients did not call back. Then look at the scheduling side and find that the confirmation calls are not happening either, so the cancellations arrive the morning of, when the slot cannot be refilled.

We start with the phone, because that is where both problems live. Billing calls get answered, the balance gets surfaced and paid by secure link on the same call, and the ones that need a human get written to the chart as a case with the patient’s name, date of birth and reason for calling, so the business office works from athenaOne rather than a voicemail box. On the scheduling side the confirmation calls run every night, cancellations arrive with days of notice, and the waitlist backfills the slot.

The balance work improves because the phone was fixed. That is the ordering most practices get backwards.

How to decide in a week

Three questions.

Which department has the problem? If it is the business office alone and your front desk is fine, you are shopping for a billing product. If the phone is the bottleneck in both places, buying a billing product will not fix the phone.

Where does the workflow stop? An agnostic platform cannot spend its roadmap on athenaOne depth, so the workflow tends to stop at the handoff. Ask to see where each vendor’s stops on your own balance and scheduling flows.

Who owns it after go-live? A payments product is easy to own because the scope is bounded. An operation spanning phone, referrals, scheduling and revenue is not, which is why we run it rather than hand it to you. When athenaOne changes or a rule changes, fixing it is our job.

Before your next leadership meeting, count two things: accounts receivable over 90 days, and calls your team could not pick up last week. Put a dollar figure on both. The order of operations usually settles itself.