Text-to-Pay for CureMD | Collect Balances by Text

A patient in a CureMD practice who owes $45 has two ways to pay it. She can dig up the portal invite, reset a password she made two years ago, find the balance, and check out.

Or she can call the front desk during office hours and read her card number to whoever picks up. Most patients pick a third option, which is later.

Later adds up fast. Patients now owe about 23% of allowable claim amounts across payer types, according to first-quarter 2026 data from Kodiak Solutions. In an October 2025 MGMA Stat poll, 29% of medical group leaders said patient balance collections had gotten worse over the past year.

Every small balance that waits a month gets harder to collect. It also costs another statement each time it’s re-sent.

We think the fix in a CureMD practice is the channel, since the billing side already works well. Put a secure payment link in the text thread where the patient confirmed their visit, and a $45 copay becomes a two-tap task they can finish in a parking lot.

That’s the case for CureMD text-to-pay patient billing through Curogram. CureMD keeps posting charges, filing claims, and running RCM. Curogram sends the request to the phone the patient is already holding, and your billing team logs the payment back into CureMD each day.

None of this asks your billing team to change how it works in CureMD. It changes one thing: who makes the first move on a balance. Today, that’s the patient. With a texted link, it’s your practice, on the same day the charge posts.

The Waiting Balance

CureMD’s billing side has a strong track record. In its 2016 ambulatory RCM services report, KLAS named CureMD the top performer for overall satisfaction among 1 to 10 physician practices, with a score of 7.7 out of 9.

On the patient side, CureMD offers two payment paths. Its Patient Portal includes online bill pay. Its AI Contact Center answers calls 24/7/365 in 14 languages and can take a card payment over the phone.

CureMD also documents a text-to-pay option through Global Payments, its payment processing partner, which practices request through a support ticket. If your practice already uses it, keep reading. The questions that matter are where the link lands and whether the patient can reply to it.

Every Payment Channel Waits for the Patient

Portal bill pay and phone payments share one trait: the patient has to make the first move. Nobody calls a practice to volunteer $45. Most CureMD patient portal bill pay friction shows up at the login screen, before the patient ever sees the balance.

A patient who hasn’t logged in since last year needs a username, then a password reset, then the reset email, then a new password that meets the rules. That’s four steps before the $45.

Think about who holds those balances. A 74-year-old on a geriatric panel may never have activated the portal at all. A working parent sees the portal email, flags it for later, and loses it under 40 newer emails by Friday.

Both would pay a clear request without a second thought. Patients say as much. In Salucro’s 2023 survey of 1,348 U.S. patients, 59% said they’d rather get a billing notice by text than by phone or email.

How a $45 Copay Ages Past 90 Days

Walk one balance through a typical CureMD statement cycle:

1. The visit closes and the $45 balance posts in CureMD.
2. A portal notice goes out by email and sits unopened under a pharmacy coupon.
3. Billing prints, folds, stuffs, and mails a paper statement.
4. Thirty days pass. The patient means to pay but won’t set up a portal account for $45.
5. A second statement goes out, with a second round of postage.
6. The balance crosses 90 days, and the write-off talk begins.

By that point, the practice has paid for two mailings to chase a $45 balance.

What the Waiting Costs

Statement math varies by practice, so treat these as illustrative planning figures. Swap in your own spend and first-mailing rate from CureMD’s reports.

At $900 a month, a practice spends $10,800 a year on envelopes that mostly go unanswered. That spend sits on top of your CureMD subscription and any billing service fees. And each re-mailed statement adds cost to a balance that’s often under $100.

Why the Old Pressure Points are Weaker

Practices used to count on two levers to move old balances. One was the threat of credit reporting. The CFPB’s January 2025 rule to pull medical bills from credit reports was struck down by a federal court in July 2025, and MGMA notes there’s now no nationwide standard.

Collection agencies are the other lever, and they keep a cut of whatever they recover. So the cheapest dollar is still the one paid in the first few weeks. In that same October 2025 MGMA poll, groups that held steady on patient collections mostly relied on text or email reminders and online payment tools.

The Billing Manager Who Can See Everything

Your billing manager can pull every aged balance from CureMD in a few clicks. She knows the names, the amounts, and the dates of service. What she lacks is a way to reach those patients that they’ll actually respond to.

The portal waits for a login. Calls roll to voicemail, and the envelope sits on a kitchen counter under last week’s mail. So on the 30th, statement number two goes out, and the 60-day bucket in CureMD’s aging report gets a little bigger.

The Two-Tap Payment

Curogram Highlight: Text-to-Pay in the Thread Patients Already Use

Curogram Text-to-Pay lets your staff send a secure payment link to any patient with a mobile number, straight from Curogram’s dashboard. The link lands in the patient’s existing text thread with your practice, the same one that carries appointment reminders and two-way messages.

On the patient side, there’s nothing to download and no account to create. They tap the link, enter a card on a secure payment page, and tap to pay. A confirmation arrives in the thread a moment later, so they don’t call to ask whether it went through.

On your side, every payment is tracked in the dashboard with a receipt, which makes the daily posting into CureMD billing quick. Your team can see who paid and who still needs a nudge. A patient with a question about the charge just replies, and billing answers in the same thread.

Curogram is HIPAA-compliant and signs a Business Associate Agreement with your practice. Card details never pass through the text message itself.

Text-to-Pay works best alongside the rest of the thread. Appointment reminders build the reply habit, and 2-way texting handles the questions that would otherwise become phone calls. When the balance posts, the payment request comes from a number the patient has already answered.

CureMD keeps handling charges, claims, and RCM, and your team posts each texted payment back into it daily.

Conclusion: Stop Waiting on Balances Patients Would Happily Pay

Most patients with a small balance already plan to pay it. What they’re missing is a request that fits into 30 seconds, from a number they know, with a button at the end. CureMD bills the visit and files the claim. Curogram puts the payment request in the text thread the patient already answers.

Keep the CureMD portal for records and the AI Contact Center for patients who call. Both earn their place. Add the channel that reaches the patients who do neither, since that’s where small balances pile up month after month.

Before you look at any vendor, pull three numbers from CureMD: last month’s statement spend, your first-mailing collection rate, and the patient responsibility sitting past 60 days. Together they show the size of your collection gap. Compare that gap to a channel Gartner puts at up to a 98% open rate.

Book a 15-minute Curogram demo and bring that data with you. We’ll show a payment link going out in a live thread, the confirmation that comes back, and the daily posting routine your billing team would run in CureMD.

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