Company Facts

Frost-Arnett Company was founded in 1893 and is headquartered in Nashville, Tennessee, with correspondence directed to P.O. Box 198988, Nashville, Tennessee 37219. The main line is (615) 256-7156, and consumer facing numbers reported on account letters include 1-855-287-7043 and 877-290-9291. The website is frost-arnett.com.

Operations extend beyond Nashville to a call center in Campbellsville, Kentucky, an office in Houston, Texas, and offshore operations in Delhi, India.

Healthcare is effectively the entire business, reported at roughly 99 percent of revenue. If Frost-Arnett is contacting you, the underlying obligation is a medical balance.

The service lines span the revenue cycle rather than sitting only at the end of it: early out self-pay resolution, bad debt collections, insurance follow-up, complex claims resolution, and denials management.

The 2026 Acquisition

On May 4, 2026, Harris & Harris, Ltd. announced its acquisition of Frost-Arnett. ACA International, the industry's main trade association, reported the transaction, and Harris & Harris covered it in its own company news.

Frost-Arnett is being folded into Action RCM, the healthcare revenue cycle brand Harris & Harris operates, with the stated intent of maintaining continuity for existing clients while broadening capabilities across early out services, bad debt collections, complex claims resolution, insurance follow-up, and denials management.

For consumers, an acquisition of this kind usually changes very little in the short term. Your account does not become someone else's debt, the validation and dispute rights attached to it do not reset, and the statute of limitations is unaffected. What can change over time is the name on correspondence, the phone number, the payment portal, and eventually the furnisher name on a credit report.

Two practical implications follow. First, if the name on a letter differs from the name on your credit report, that discrepancy may be explained by the corporate change rather than by an error, though it is still worth confirming in writing. Second, verify any new payment address or portal before sending money, because ownership transitions are exactly the moment scammers imitate a real company's correspondence.

Our profile of the acquiring company is in all about Harris & Harris.

What They Actually Collect

The revenue cycle footprint matters because it determines your legal position, and the letter does not always make the stage obvious.

Insurance follow-up and denials management are not consumer collection at all. In that work the vendor is pursuing the payer on the provider's behalf, chasing an unpaid, underpaid, or denied claim. If you are contacted at this stage it is generally to obtain information needed to get the claim paid, such as confirming coverage or completing a coordination of benefits form. Responding promptly is in your interest, because an unresolved claim eventually converts into patient responsibility.

Early out is pre charge off work conducted in the provider's name. Accounts are recent, records are complete, the balance is usually not on a credit report yet, and flexibility is greatest.

Bad debt collection is the third party stage after charge off, where Fair Debt Collection Practices Act protections apply in full including the validation notice requirement.

If a letter is ambiguous, ask in writing which stage the account is in and whether the communication is an attempt to collect a debt. A third party collection communication has to say so.

What to Do About a Medical Balance

Verification matters more with medical accounts than with any other category, because they arrive in collections carrying errors at a higher rate.

Request an itemized bill rather than a summary. Confirm the claim was submitted to insurance and adjudicated correctly, check whether a secondary payer existed and was billed, and look for duplicate charges, services not received, and coding problems.

Ask about financial assistance. Nonprofit hospitals are generally required to maintain a financial assistance policy, and balances that should have been reduced or eliminated under one reach agencies regularly. Applying after an account has gone to collections is not too late. Where the provider is a nonprofit hospital, IRS section 501(r) requires reasonable efforts to determine eligibility before extraordinary collection actions, with a 120 day notification period and a 240 day application period running from the first post discharge billing statement, and the hospital remains accountable for what its agency does.

Dispute in writing within 30 days of the first notice if anything is wrong, which suspends collection until verification is mailed. Send it by a method that creates proof of delivery.

Know the credit reporting rules before assuming the worst. The credit bureaus voluntarily exclude paid medical collections entirely, exclude unpaid medical collections under $500, and impose a waiting period before reporting larger unpaid balances. The CFPB rule that would have removed medical debt from consumer reports altogether was finalized in January 2025 and vacated by a federal court in July 2025, so it is not in effect. Our post on special rules in medical debt collection covers the current landscape.

Check your state's statute of limitations before paying anything on an older balance, since a payment or written acknowledgment restarts the clock in many states. Tennessee's limitations rules are their own subject and vary by debt type.

Complaints go to the CFPB's debt collection resource center, which also publishes a searchable complaint database, and to your state attorney general.

What Providers Should Ask

If you are a health system with accounts at Frost-Arnett or evaluating the combined organization, an ownership change is a reasonable moment to re-confirm the basics.

Get written confirmation that the business associate agreement carries forward to the acquiring entity, since HIPAA obligations follow the data rather than the corporate name. Confirm the minimum necessary data set has not expanded. Ask whether account handling, staffing, or offshore processing arrangements are changing, and whether the compliance escalation contact is the same person.

Then re-run the standard checks: current credit reporting practice and thresholds, how 501(r) timing is tracked, the contingency rate by aging band and any minimum fee per account, litigation policy and who authorizes each filing, and the termination and data return provisions. Our full list is in the medical collection agency vetting checklist.

How It Compares

Frost-Arnett belongs to a small group of long tenured healthcare specialists that also includes State Collection Service in Madison and others founded in the mid twentieth century or earlier. What distinguishes them collectively is depth in one vertical rather than breadth across many, and the 2026 acquisition reflects the consolidation reshaping that group.

Rental and property management collections require a different specialization entirely. A move out balance turns on a lease, an itemized ledger, a security deposit disposition, and dated inspection photographs, and resolving a dispute means someone pulling the file to answer a question about one line item. Advanced Collection Bureau works residential, apartment, student housing, and medical placements on contingency out of Rockledge, Florida, and can be reached at 321-633-4999 or through the get started page.