Abstract: A patient financial advocacy system is disclosed for identifying potential funding sources for uninsured patients and for the patient portion of healthcare debts that are covered by managed healthcare plans by automating the identification of potential funding sources and automating the collection of data required by such potential funding sources. The system is an automated system ad includes three stages, namely, a detection stage; an execution stage and a measurement stage. In the detection stage, a multi-tiered questionnaire is used during a patient interview to identify potential funding sources. In accordance with an important aspect of the invention, the questionnaire is structured to find the funding source with the highest yield. A rules engine is programmed to analyze the patient's answers to the questions and identify a potential funding source.