SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Twilio (NYSE: TWLO), the customer engagement platform that drives real-time, personalized experiences for leading brands, and Cedar, the leading patient financial experience platform for healthcare providers, today announced Twilio is powering Cedar's patient communications across SMS and Voice, including via Twilio's AI-powered ConversationRelay service, with the goals of improving the patient financial experience, driving operational efficiency and delivering cost reduction.
Navigating healthcare bills can be overwhelming, particularly for patients managing multiple providers or facing the burden of being uninsured. Simultaneously, healthcare providers are inundated with thousands of daily inquiries from patients seeking clarity on their financial obligations, driving up administrative costs. Cedar is addressing this systemic challenge by leveraging Twilio’s scalable communications technology, seamlessly integrating it into its platform to enhance accessibility, streamline patient interactions, and create a more intuitive financial experience—while also reducing operational expenses for providers.
Cedar is leveraging Twilio’s flexible and innovative solutions to build an AI-powered patient financial experience, including:
- Streamlined Communication: Cedar utilizes Twilio’s SMS capabilities to enhance bill notifications and appointment reminders, ensuring patients receive timely and effective updates.
- Seamless Payment Experience: By integrating Twilio’s Voice API and Stripe Pay Connector, Cedar enables patients to make secure payments over the phone with interactive voice response (IVR), including support for Flexible Spending Accounts (FSA) and Health Savings Accounts (HSA). With roughly half of FSA account holders forfeiting funds due to lack of awareness, this will help patients maximize available resources.
- Smart and Personalized Patient Support: Built on Twilio’s ConversationRelay service, Cedar later this year will be able to automate inbound patient billing calls with AI-powered voice agents that provide quick answers, reduce wait times, and improve satisfaction.
Twilio’s ConversationRelay service, which enables developers to create robust natural voice AI agents by seamlessly integrating real-time streaming, speech recognition, and interruption handling, will support HIPAA-eligible use cases in the coming weeks for healthcare providers.
"At Cedar, the patient experience is at the core of all the work we do. Our work with Twilio enables us to combine AI-powered technology and empathetic service design, transforming how providers engage with patients about their bills,” said Dugan Winkie, Head of Commercial Strategy at Cedar. "As patient out-of-pocket spending continues to rise, we’re entering a new era of healthcare billing—and we have a huge opportunity to utilize new technology, such as agentic AI, to improve experiences for patients and reduce cost for providers. By capturing context and streamlining interactions, AI will ensure human agents step in at the right moment—equipped with the full picture to deliver more meaningful, personalized care.”
"Cedar is doing the work to unlock a better financial experience, so patients and providers are less focused on billing and more on patient outcomes,” said Andy O'Dower, Vice President of Product Voice and Video at Twilio. "We’re just beginning to see the potential of how conversational AI agents can streamline billing for patients while maintaining their trust. Beyond simple IVRs, AI backed by relevant, secure data can provide the patient with context and resources to create a seamless and empathetic experience. We look forward to continuing our work with Cedar to deliver more efficiencies and value to their customers."
Cedar and Twilio onsite at HIMSS
Cedar Head of Commercial Strategy, Dugan Winkie, will join Twilio’s session at HIMSS, How to Build Intelligent Patient Engagement in 2025 on March 4 at 12:45 PM ET, alongside an executive from OhMD. They will discuss how healthcare organizations can leverage emerging technology, such as AI, to build more intelligent and connected interactions across the customer care journey. Visit Twilio at Booth #848 to learn more.
About Cedar
Cedar is the leading financial experience platform for healthcare providers who prioritize patients. Cedar delivers healthcare’s top patient financial experience platform for modern revenue cycle teams. Starting with consumer-grade technology, we offer the only platform that integrates a patient’s billing and benefits information in one simple payment experience. Our platform is a must-have for finance leaders to increase patient payments while boosting patient loyalty. To learn more, visit www.cedar.com and join us on LinkedIn, X, and YouTube.
About Twilio Inc.
Today’s leading companies trust Twilio’s Customer Engagement Platform (CEP) to build direct, personalized relationships with their customers everywhere in the world. Twilio enables companies to use communications and data to add intelligence and security to every step of the customer journey, from sales to marketing to growth, customer service and many more engagement use cases in a flexible, programmatic way. Across 180 countries and territories, millions of developers and hundreds of thousands of businesses use Twilio to create magical experiences for their customers. For more information about Twilio (NYSE: TWLO), visit www.twilio.com.
Forward-Looking Statements
This press release contains forward-looking statements, including, but not limited to, statements regarding Twilio’s expectations regarding the future availability of products and solutions such as HIPAA-eligible use cases for Twilio’s ConversationRelay.
You should not rely upon forward-looking statements as predictions of future events, the outcome of which are subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors that may cause our actual results, performance, or achievements to differ materially from those described in the forward-looking statements, including those more fully described in our most recent filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Forward-looking statements represent our beliefs and assumptions only as of the date such statements are made and we undertake no obligation to update any forward-looking statements, except as required by law.
