Abstract: The creditworthiness of a recipient of healthcare services is obtained by accessing a database containing credit information relating only to payment of healthcare-related charges by a plurality of healthcare recipients; retrieving the recipient's payment history information; and evaluating the granting of credit using the payment history information retrieved. The database is also used to select a strategy to be used in collecting an overdue invoice to a healthcare recipient. A credit rating score is assigned to the delinquent recipient based on the payment history of the delinquent recipient as determined by information in the database, and each strategy is assigned a value corresponding to possible credit rating scores.