What Features Should a Healthcare Financing App Like Walnut Have?

Key Takeaways

• Rising medical costs are driving demand for healthcare financing apps that help patients manage expenses while enabling faster provider payments. 
• Platforms like Walnut improve real-time approvals, embedded payments, automated billing, and integrations.
• Building a successful platform requires AI underwriting, secure infrastructure, compliance, and self-service tools.
• The growing healthcare finance market presents strong opportunities for founders and investors.
• How Idea Usher can help businesses build healthcare financing apps like Walnut with scalable fintech solutions tailored to healthcare providers.

Healthcare providers are realizing that patients often postpone treatment because of the upfront cost, not because they don’t need care. As medical expenses continue to rise, affordability has become a major factor in healthcare decisions. That’s why more people are turning to healthcare financing apps that let them spread payments over time instead of paying everything at once. Building a platform like Walnut is much more than adding installment payments. It requires a system that can approve patients instantly, support healthcare providers, and deliver a seamless financing experience from start to finish.

Over the years, we’ve built healthcare financing solutions using embedded payment systems and intelligent lending technologies that make medical payments easier for patients and providers alike. Drawing on that experience, we’re writing this blog to explain the must-have features of a healthcare financing app like Walnut and what it takes to build a secure, scalable, and trusted platform.

Market Size and Growth of Healthcare Financing Platforms

According to Databridge Market Research, the healthcare finance solutions market is growing rapidly, with its global value expected to increase from USD 141.19 billion in 2025 to USD 269.17 billion by 2033 at a CAGR of 8.40%. This growth reflects rising demand for technology that makes healthcare more affordable for patients while improving cash flow for providers, creating a strong opportunity for founders and investors building modern patient financing platforms. 

Source: Databridge Market Research

Market Growth is Steady

Healthcare financing continues to attract strong investment because it supports an essential service that remains in demand regardless of economic conditions. Flywire shows how valuable this market has become through its healthcare payment platform, which integrates with hospital systems to simplify patient billing and payment management. The company generated over $623 million in annual revenue, demonstrating the significant business opportunity for enterprise healthcare payment solutions.

This steady market expansion is fueled by a few critical factors:

• Provider Revenue Cycle Pressures: Hospitals and private practices are facing massive administrative overhead and delayed reimbursements from traditional insurance providers. Financing platforms offer these medical providers immediate cash flow while transferring the collection risk away from their balance sheets.
• Regulatory Backing and Open Banking: Modern regulatory frameworks are making it safer and more efficient to integrate credit-scoring mechanisms directly into healthcare infrastructure. This opens up clear pathways for platforms to scale across different state lines and medical specialties.
• A Shift Toward Transparency: Modern healthcare consumers expect the same financial clarity from their medical providers that they get from e-commerce platforms. Software that offers upfront pricing and instant credit approvals is capturing market share at an accelerating pace.

Salucro Healthcare Solutions is another strong example of the growing demand for patient payment technology. The company focuses on helping healthcare providers simplify billing, improve patient financial engagement, and automate payment collections. Its acquisition by U.S. Bank reflects the strategic value of this market, while its estimated annual revenue of $15–25 million highlights the steady growth potential of specialized healthcare payment platforms. 

Platforms see Rapid Adoption

Patient financing is becoming a standard part of healthcare rather than an optional service. More clinics now want financing platforms that integrate with their existing systems so patients can choose flexible payment plans during their visit. CareCredit, backed by Synchrony Financial, is one of the strongest examples of this trend. It is accepted at more than 285,000 provider locations, while Synchrony generates over $24 billion in annual revenue, highlighting the scale of this market.

These platforms also have a strong business model because healthcare providers introduce financing directly to their patients, reducing the need for expensive marketing. PrimaHealth Credit has shown how successful this approach can be. By focusing on dental and orthodontic financing for patients across different credit profiles, the company has grown to around $380 million in annual revenue, demonstrating the potential for specialized patient financing solutions.

The Problem Walnut Was Built to Solve

Walnut was built to modernize healthcare payments by bringing a simple digital financing experience to medical providers. Rather than operating like a traditional lender, it integrates directly into a clinic’s payment workflow and lets patients choose transparent installment plans during checkout. This approach makes medical bills easier to manage while helping providers receive payments more quickly and improve cash flow. 

Rising Costs Delay Care

The fundamental market gap is driven by a stark clinical and financial mismatch. Healthcare premiums continue to climb, forcing a massive segment of the population into high-deductible health plans. When patients face a sudden medical requirement, they are frequently met with thousands of dollars in unexpected out-of-pocket costs.

• The Impact on Care: Millions of patients actively postpone or cancel critical, provider-recommended treatments simply because they lack the liquidity to settle a large upfront bill.
• The Impact on Providers: When patients walk away from care due to immediate pricing fears, medical practices experience plummeting treatment acceptance rates and underutilized clinical capacity.

Walnut capitalized on this friction by capturing this exact demographic of price-sensitive patients. This strong market relevance allowed the company to scale rapidly, attracting institutional investors and securing a major $110 million Series A funding round to fuel its enterprise expansion.

Legacy Financing Creates Friction

Traditional medical financing often creates unnecessary delays with lengthy applications, paperwork, and slow approval processes that interrupt the patient experience. Walnut takes a different approach by embedding financing directly into a provider’s existing billing system. Patients can receive instant payment options with a simple digital checkout, helping clinics reduce administrative work while making healthcare payments faster and more convenient.

Providers Need Better Collection Tools

From a balance sheet perspective, healthcare providers are poorly equipped to act as debt collection agencies. When patients are forced to take on massive bills after a procedure, default rates spike. Hospitals and private practices historically collect less than 20% of out-of-pocket balances, resulting in billions of dollars in bad debt and wasted administrative time spent chasing unpaid invoices. Walnut solves this systemic collection failure through a highly efficient business model:

• Upfront Liquidity: The platform pays the medical provider upfront for the treatment, immediately removing the collection risk from the clinic’s balance sheet.
• Optimized Collections: Walnut takes over the recurring billing cycle, offering the patient flexible monthly installments while charging the provider a structured transaction fee for the guaranteed capital.
• Revenue Performance: This approach successfully drives up treatment acceptance rates and optimizes clinical cash flow.

This robust enterprise performance is backed by clear financial results. Driven by partnerships with dozens of major healthcare networks across specialties like dermatology, fertility, and primary care, Walnut has demonstrated exceptional growth, scaling its platform operations to generate an estimated $10 million to $15 million in annual recurring revenue.

Walnut’s Embedded Finance Approach Explained

Walnut simplifies medical financing by embedding the entire payment experience into a clinic’s digital workflow. Its API-first platform automates approvals, payments, and collections, replacing slow manual processes with a smoother experience for both patients and providers. This creates a more predictable revenue stream for healthcare businesses while reducing administrative effort.

Embedded Care Journeys

By embedding payment capabilities directly into the clinical workflow, the system captures patient intent right when they are making a treatment decision. Patients no longer face the intimidating prospect of being handed off to a cold, third-party bank or being forced to sign up for a high-interest credit card in a public waiting area.

This integrated approach cuts customer acquisition costs down to nearly zero. The platform secures transactions across highly profitable medical fields like reproductive health, cosmetic procedures, and advanced dental care, where procedures typically run from $2,000 to over $15,000.

Real-Time Approvals

The platform utilizes advanced, real-time underwriting engines to assess risk instantly. Instead of dragging a patient through a lengthy application process, the checkout framework reviews soft credit signals and basic banking data within seconds.

• Instant Approvals: Patients can instantly view customized installment terms, such as breaking a $4,800 out-of-pocket surgical fee into 12 predictable monthly installments of $400.
• Patient Protections: The patient receives a transparent, interest-free payment plan that carries no hidden penalties or complex compounding interest structures.
• Provider Safeguards: The automated backend checks the applicant’s credit profile instantly. This lets the medical practice confirm the appointment immediately, which helps prevent patients from walking away from necessary care plans.

Seamless Integrations

For healthcare providers, Walnut fits into existing practice management and medical billing systems, so staff can continue using the tools they already know. Clinics can offer flexible payment plans without adding extra administrative work or changing their daily workflow. The platform typically charges providers a 4% to 8% transaction fee while delivering the full treatment payment within 24 to 48 hours. 

Walnut also manages ongoing billing and payment collections, helping practices reduce outstanding accounts receivable by up to 30% and maintain healthier cash flow.

Key Features of a Healthcare Financing App Like Walnut

Building a competitive healthcare financing app requires a highly specialized feature set. Walnut succeeded by designing software that meets the exact needs of two distinct user groups: patients who need transparent payment options, and medical practices that require reliable cash flow. To capture this market, developers and investors must focus on creating an ecosystem where medical workflows and complex financial operations integrate flawlessly.

1. Real-Time Underwriting

Inside Walnut, this feature is the engine that drives the entire transaction. When a patient decides to move forward with a treatment plan, the practice management system instantly triggers the Walnut API.

• The Process: The patient inputs a few basic data points, such as their legal name and mobile number, directly into the clinic interface or a secure mobile link.
• The Engine: Walnut’s backend algorithm evaluates the applicant’s credit risk by analyzing alternative data streams and soft credit inquiries within seconds.
• The Result: The user receives an instant credit decision right on the spot, allowing them to book their appointment immediately instead of waiting days for bank approvals.

2. Embedded Financing

Walnut is built directly into a healthcare provider’s payment process, so patients do not have to leave the clinic’s website or visit a separate lending platform. Whether paying at the front desk or through an online invoice, patients can select Walnut as a payment option alongside traditional methods, creating a faster checkout experience and helping providers reduce abandoned treatment plans.

3. Flexible Payment Plans

Once approved, patients use Walnut to customize how they want to handle their medical debt. The interface presents a clear breakdown of installment options, typically spreading the cost over three, six, or twelve months. Patients appreciate this because there are no hidden fees or escalating interest charges. Seeing a large medical bill broken down into predictable monthly amounts gives users the financial confidence to move forward with elective or necessary treatments.

4. Self-Service Portals

Walnut provides patients with a dedicated personal dashboard to manage their active repayment schedules independently. Users log into this secure portal from any device to handle their account needs without having to call customer service. Inside the app, patients routinely perform several tasks:

• Update details: Users can quickly switch out debit cards or link new bank accounts.
• Track spending: The portal displays clear timelines of past transactions and remaining balances.
• Manage documents: Patients can easily upload verification documents or check on active refund requests.

5. Provider Revenue Dashboards

For healthcare providers, Walnut offers a centralized dashboard to manage patient financing in one place. Staff can view funded treatments, track active payment plans, monitor settlements, generate payment links, and check financing approvals in real time. This reduces manual billing work and gives clinics better visibility into their cash flow.

6. Advanced Data Protection

Because Walnut handles both payment details and sensitive healthcare information, security is a core part of the platform. It uses identity verification to help prevent fraud, protects data with bank-grade encryption, and is designed to meet industry standards such as PCI-DSS and HIPAA. This gives both patients and healthcare providers confidence that financial and medical information is handled securely. 

7. Automated Reminders

Walnut makes repayment simple by automating the entire payment process. Patients can use auto-pay for scheduled installments and receive reminder notifications by text or email before each payment is due. If a payment fails, the platform automatically retries the transaction, helping patients stay on track while reducing collection work for healthcare providers.

Advanced Features that Can Improve a Healthcare Financing App

While features like instant financing and flexible payment plans form the foundation of a healthcare financing app, advanced capabilities can significantly improve user experience and operational efficiency. Leading healthcare financing apps are leveraging AI, automation, and deeper healthcare integrations to deliver more personalized financing, streamline provider workflows, and boost patient satisfaction.

1. AI Payment Plans

Use AI to analyze a patient’s payment history, financial behavior, insurance coverage, and bill amount to recommend customized repayment options. Cedar Intelligence personalizes financial journeys using AI, helping providers improve collections while offering patients payment plans that better match their financial situation.

2. Pre-Visit Financing

Allow patients to check financing eligibility before visiting the clinic through a soft credit check or pre-qualification link. Sunbit enables patients to complete financing applications in seconds before or during their appointment, reducing payment uncertainty and increasing treatment acceptance.

3. EHR Financing Integration

Integrate financing directly into electronic health record systems so providers can offer payment options without switching platforms. CareCredit’s Epic MyChart integration lets patients pay medical bills and select financing options within their existing healthcare portal, streamlining the billing experience.

4. Smart Cost Estimator

Provide patients with an AI-powered cost estimator that calculates insurance coverage, expected out-of-pocket expenses, and available financing options before treatment begins. CareStack integrates financing into treatment planning, allowing providers to present payment options alongside care recommendations.

5. Omnichannel Payments

Enable patients to start financing on one device and complete payments through a mobile app, patient portal, email, SMS, or in-clinic checkout. CareCredit promotes digital payment links, mobile access, and seamless financing across multiple patient touchpoints to improve convenience.

6. AI Payment Reminders

Leverage AI to determine the ideal time, channel, and message for payment reminders based on patient behavior. Cedar Intelligence uses AI-driven personalization to optimize outreach, increasing payment completion rates while reducing unnecessary reminder fatigue.

7. Provider Analytics

Offer advanced dashboards that track financing approvals, treatment acceptance rates, repayment performance, and revenue trends. Sunbit helps providers monitor financing performance to improve cash flow and understand how patient financing contributes to practice growth.

Cost of Impact of Different Features for Healthcare Financing App

When developing a healthcare fintech application, capital allocation must be strategic. Investors and founders need to balance product depth with development costs. Every capability added to the software architecture affects the initial launch timeline, compliance liabilities, and ongoing engineering overhead. Structuring the product development roadmap into distinct tiers allows you to manage cash flow while building a scalable system.

Core MVP Features and Development Cost

The Minimum Viable Product focuses entirely on delivering a functional checkout experience. It includes the absolute minimum required to safely process a transaction, register a patient, and route capital to a provider. Building this foundation requires balancing clean code with essential financial tools. The table below outlines the basic features required for launch and their estimated development costs:

Advanced Features That Increase Development Cost

Once your basic healthcare financing app proves its market fit, adding advanced software capabilities can help you capture a larger market share. These features automate manual processes, optimize credit underwriting, and remove transaction friction at the point of care. While these systems require a larger upfront investment, they deliver higher margins by lowering default rates and boosting application processing speeds.

The breakdown below highlights these premium capabilities:

1. AI-Powered Underwriting Engine

An AI-powered underwriting engine evaluates applicants using real-time financial and behavioral data to make instant lending decisions. It helps reduce manual reviews, improves approval speed, and minimizes credit risk while providing a seamless financing experience.

Complexity & Value: High complexity. Uses machine learning models to review alternative data instantly, lowering default rates.

Estimated Cost: $50,000 – $75,000

2. Automated Fraud Detection

Automated fraud detection safeguards the platform by verifying user identities, detecting suspicious transactions, and preventing fraudulent financing applications. This feature enhances security while protecting both healthcare providers and patients.

Complexity & Value: Medium complexity. Verifies identities in real time to prevent loan fraud and identity theft.

Estimated Cost: $25,000 – $40,000

3. EHR Integration Modules

EHR integration connects the financing platform with electronic health record systems, allowing patient information and billing data to sync automatically. This reduces administrative work, minimizes errors, and creates a more efficient workflow for healthcare staff.

Complexity & Value: Very high complexity. Plugs directly into electronic health record platforms to remove manual double-entry for clinical staff.

Estimated Cost: $60,000 – $90,000

4. Embedded Financing APIs

Embedded financing APIs allow hospitals and clinics to integrate financing directly into their websites, patient portals, or checkout systems. Patients can apply for financing without leaving the provider’s platform, resulting in a smoother payment journey and higher conversion rates.

Complexity & Value: High complexity. Allows partner clinics to build your payment options directly into their custom websites.

Estimated Cost: $40,000 – $65,000

Enterprise Features Worth the Investment

For institutional healthcare financing apps looking to partner with major hospital networks or multi-location health systems, enterprise-grade infrastructure is mandatory. These robust features protect your business against regulatory penalties, secure large datasets, and provide the operational scale needed to handle millions of dollars in monthly transaction volume. The table below compares these enterprise-grade modules:

Lessons Founders Can Learn from Walnut’s Product Strategy

For entrepreneurs looking to deploy capital into the healthcare fintech space, analyzing Walnut’s trajectory offers a masterclass in market positioning. Success in this sector requires more than just building a functional lending app. It depends on a founder’s ability to navigate complex medical billing practices while keeping user adoption friction near zero. By studying how Walnut scaled its product architecture, investors can gain a clear blueprint for building a highly competitive platform.

1. Solve Real Medical Pain Points

Walnut succeeded because it avoided the common mistake of launching a generic Buy Now, Pay Later tool for the general retail market. Instead, the leadership team focused on a specific, high-friction problem: the rise of out-of-pocket patient debt within the American healthcare system.

The strategy was built on clear product principles:

• Focus on Large Balances: The platform intentionally targeted mid-to-high cost medical specialties, such as fertility treatments, dermatology, and advanced orthodontics.
• Target Patient Pain Points: These procedures often cost between $3,000 and $10,000 and are rarely fully covered by standard commercial insurance plans.
• Deliver Fast Solutions: By focusing purely on this high-yield, underserved pocket of medical billing, Walnut built a highly relevant platform that solved a major financial headache for users on day one.

2. Embed Financing Into Workflows

Instead of sending patients to a separate loan application, Walnut keeps financing within the provider’s existing payment experience, making checkout faster and easier. Its integration with Peachy further expanded this approach by adding Walnut’s financing options directly into Peachy’s automated billing and patient communication workflows, helping Walnut reach more healthcare providers without relying on costly customer acquisition.

3. Prioritize Trust and Simplicity

Walnut built its platform around transparent healthcare financing with clear monthly installment plans and no hidden fees. This simple, patient-friendly approach helps build trust and makes it easier for people to pay for medical care without the confusion often associated with hospital billing. The company’s strong product strategy also attracted significant investor confidence. 

Walnut raised $110 million in Series A funding, including $10 million in equity led by Gradient Ventures and $100 million in debt financing from Clear Haven Capital. Combined with its 4% to 8% provider fee model, this funding gives Walnut the ability to support large financing volumes while continuing to expand its healthcare network.

Develop a Healthcare Financing App like Walnut with Idea Usher

Investing in a healthcare financing platform requires a development partner who understands both complex fintech mechanics and strict medical regulations. Idea Usher provides the specialized technical expertise and strategic guidance needed to turn your investment into a highly scalable marketplace leader. We manage the entire product lifecycle so you can focus on securing provider partnerships and growing your loan portfolio.

Strategy-First Product Development

We do not just jump straight into writing code. Our process begins with an intensive strategic discovery phase designed to protect your investment capital and maximize early ROI. We work closely with you to analyze market opportunities and choose the most profitable medical niches for your launch.

• Market Validation: We analyze your target medical specialties to ensure you launch where patient demand is highest.
• MVP Optimization: Our team trims away unnecessary features to build a lean, high-performing initial product that gets you to market quickly.
• Risk Management: We structure your platform’s workflow from day one to balance smooth user onboarding with smart credit risk management.

By focusing heavily on product validation before development begins, we help you launch a highly targeted platform while keeping your initial engineering costs low.

End-to-End Fintech Expertise

We build secure patient financing platforms that integrate smoothly with hospital systems and existing billing workflows. Our team develops AI-powered underwriting, identity verification, and automated payment infrastructure while integrating trusted solutions like Plaid and Stripe. The result is a scalable platform that delivers a seamless financing experience for patients and healthcare providers alike.

Built to Scale with Your Business

A healthcare platform must be built to handle massive transaction volumes without experiencing system downtime or security gaps. Idea Usher provides the elite engineering talent needed to build a durable, enterprise-ready software ecosystem. Our impressive development track record gives you a distinct competitive advantage:

• Massive Coding Experience: With over 500,000 hours of coding experience, our team has solved complex data routing and financial processing challenges across various industries.
• Elite Engineering Talent: Our team of ex-MAANG/FAANG developers brings world-class software architecture standards directly to your fintech project.
• Regulatory Compliance: We build our platforms from the ground up using HIPAA-ready frameworks and PCI-DSS compliant environments to keep your business fully protected against data liabilities.

Conclusion

A successful healthcare financing app should do more than offer payment plans. It should make medical payments simple for patients while helping providers receive funds quickly and manage financing with minimal effort. By combining secure payments, flexible installment options, automated billing, and seamless healthcare system integrations, you can build a platform that improves the payment experience for everyone involved. 

Things to Know About Healthcare Financing Apps