Creditor Classification 02: Medical/Health Care
Creditor Classification 02 means "Medical/Health Care". The original creditor was a medical or health care provider. This code exists so a medical debt can be classified as medical without the tradeline disclosing who treated the consumer or what they were treated for. It is reported in K1 Creditor Classification (Field K1-4) of the K1 Segment (Original Creditor Name), 2 characters at position 33.
Specification
| Code | 02 |
|---|---|
| Meaning | Medical/Health Care |
| Field | K1 Creditor Classification (Field K1-4) |
| Record | K1 Segment (Original Creditor Name) |
| Length / position | 2 chars · 33–34 |
| Category | Medical and Health Care |
| CRRG reference | CRRG Creditor Classification code table (K1 Segment) |
What Creditor Classification 02 means
- Covers hospitals, physician groups, dental and vision practices, laboratories, imaging centres, ambulance services, and other health care providers that extended credit for services rendered.
- This is the one classification with a privacy job. The reporting rules require that a furnisher who is not itself a medical provider must not report information that identifies the provider or the nature of the services, so the generic classification carries the industry while a coded or generic creditor name carries the identity. Naming the provider in plain text on the K1 defeats the entire mechanism.
- The restriction is why the classification code is doing the work: 02 tells a reader the debt is medical in nature, which is all the downstream consumer of the data is entitled to infer.
- Does NOT mean health insurance. A premium owed to an insurer is classified 06 (Insurance). 02 is the provider side, not the payer side.
- Does not by itself make the tradeline reportable. Medical collections are subject to additional bureau-level reporting restrictions independent of this field, covered under bureau notes.
When to report 02
- 1A collection agency reports a hospital's unpaid patient-responsibility balance using a coded creditor identifier rather than the hospital's name.
- 2A debt buyer acquires a portfolio of physician-practice receivables and furnishes them with a generic original-creditor identifier.
- 3A collection attorney reports a placed balance from an emergency-transport provider.
- 4A revenue-cycle servicer furnishing on behalf of a multi-site clinic group classifies every account in the book as medical.
Reporting rules
- Use the classification code, not the creditor name, to convey that the debt is medical. Report the K1 Original Creditor Name using whatever coded or generic identifier your bureau contact has approved for medical accounts.
- Never encode a diagnosis, procedure, department, or specialty anywhere on the tradeline. "City Hospital Oncology" in a name field is a disclosure the format is specifically designed to prevent.
- Do not classify a medical account as something else in an attempt to make it look more collectable. Misclassification to escape medical-specific handling is an accuracy problem, not a strategy.
- Confirm the current bureau rules on minimum balance, age, and paid status before furnishing medical collections at all. Those rules changed materially and are stricter than the format alone suggests.
Codes and fields that must agree
A file can be structurally valid and still be wrong. These are the cross-field conditions Creditor Classification 02 has to satisfy.
- Report only where a K1 segment is present, which means the furnisher is not the original provider: a collection agency, debt buyer, collection attorney, or revenue-cycle servicer.
- Pairs with Base Segment Account Type 90 (Medical Debt) for medical receivables reported in their own right, and with 48 (Collection Agency/Attorney Account) or 0C (Debt Buyer Account) where the collections relationship is what the Account Type describes.
- If the receivable was purchased rather than placed, add the K2 (Purchased From / Sold To) segment naming the seller. The same anonymity discipline applies there: the K2 counterparty is a debt-portfolio seller, so it should not be a name that reveals the treating provider.
- Date of First Delinquency belongs to the original provider account and must survive both placement and any subsequent portfolio sale unchanged. Restarting it at purchase is one of the most consequential errors in this whole set.
- The classification does not change when the account is paid, settled, or recalled. Account Status carries that; this field does not move.
Bureau differences
All three national bureaus apply medical-collection rules that sit on top of the format: a waiting period before a medical collection may appear at all, removal of medical collections once paid, and a minimum-balance floor below which medical collections are not reported. Those thresholds are set by the bureaus and have been revised more than once, so verify the current values with each bureau before furnishing. A correctly classified 02 tradeline can still be suppressed or rejected under those rules.
Common errors involving 02
Vocabulary
Keep browsing
- All 15 creditor classification codes — the full set with categories and cross-field rules.
- Metro 2 codes cheat sheet — every CRRG code set on one page.
- K1 Creditor Classification field reference — position, length, and validation rules.
- Metro 2 format reference
See Creditor Classification 02 in your own file
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