Handle payment-plan questions in chat, not on hold.
Patients with balance questions and payment-plan requests tie up your AR team all day. Chatref answers from your billing guides – explaining options, outlining next steps, and routing disputes to the right person – so your AR team focuses on collecting, not explaining.
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Why it matters
The problem this solves.
The challenge
Patients with balances call to ask about payment plans and dispute charges, interrupting your AR workflow.
What it costs
Every payment-plan explanation call is an AR specialist pulled from collections work that actually recovers revenue.
The Chatref way
Chatref explains payment options from your guides and routes disputes to the right person with full context.
The Chatref solution
How Chatref handles patient payment-plan inquiries.
A patient with an outstanding balance opens the chat on your billing portal. Chatref explains what payment-plan options your billing company supports, outlines the steps to request one, and answers questions about their balance from your guides. When a patient needs to dispute a
Real questions
What Chatref answers here.
Can I set up a payment plan for my balance?
How do I pay my medical bill online?
I think my bill is wrong – who do I contact?
What payment methods do you accept?
How long do I have to pay before it goes to collections?
Can I dispute a charge on my account?
Loved by support teams
Billing teams moving payment-plan calls from the phone queue to chat.
How billing companies use Chatref to handle patient balance inquiries before they reach the AR team.
Payment-plan calls used to eat an hour of our AR morning every day. Chatref explains the options from our guides and most patients get the information they need without ever reaching us. Our team handles the real disputes, not the routine explanations.
Patients can ask about their balance and payment options at 9 pm and get a real answer. That availability reduced the frustrated calls we used to get first thing every morning.
When a patient escalates a dispute, our team sees the full chat. They know exactly what the patient asked and what they were told – resolution takes half the time.
of patient balance and payment-plan questions answered without reaching the AR team
We connected Chatref to our payment portal via a custom action. Patients can go from a balance question to a payment confirmation without ever calling us.
Can the bot initiate a payment plan or only provide information about options?
By default it explains your payment-plan options and outlines how to request one. To let patients initiate a plan in chat, connect your payment portal via a custom action.
How does the widget route a dispute to the correct account manager?
When a patient indicates they want to dispute a charge, the widget escalates to the shared inbox and can use custom actions to assign the conversation to the account manager for that practice.
Can it answer questions about a specific patient balance?
Chatref answers from your knowledge base. For real-time balance data, connect your billing system via a custom action and the widget can surface the patient's live balance in the conversation.
Is this suitable for both billing company portals and client practice portals?
Yes. Deploy on your billing company portal for patients of all your client practices, or deploy a white-labelled instance on an individual practice's patient portal.
What happens if a patient's language is not English?
Chatref can respond in the language the patient writes in, as long as your guides cover the relevant topics. Add multilingual support to reach patients in their preferred language.
Move payment-plan questions from your phone queue to a self-serve chat.
Point Chatref at your billing guides, embed it on your patient portal, and let it handle balance and payment-plan questions so your AR team focuses on collections – free to start.
Part of Chatref for Medical Billing Services · Healthcare hub · pricing.