One of the two major credit score providers is set to wipe medical debts from its most recent scoring models to help those most financially vulnerable improve their credit scores.

VantageScore expects to remove medical collection data — regardless of amount owed or age of collection — from its two most recent score iterations, VantageScore 3.0 and 4.0, by mid-October.

The move could increase some Americans’ credit scores by as much as 20 points, the company said.

“Across our credit scoring models, medical collections accounts have minimal impact on the predictiveness of creditworthiness for a large segment of the population. As such, we are making the proactive decision to remove the information from our models entirely,” Silvio Tavares, president and CEO of VantageScore, said in a news release. “Our decision reflects VantageScore’s continued effort to offer the most predictive scoring models and to help increase financial inclusion.”

The decision builds on moves recently announced by credit bureaus Equifax, Experian and TransUnion to remove paid medical debt from 70% of consumers’ credit reports and follows a series of reports this year from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) showing the negative implications of medical debts on credit reports.

One in every five consumers had outstanding medical bills in collections, according to research from the CFPB. The consumer watchdog also found that medical collections were less predictive of future repayment risk than other collections or payment history on loans. That helped to prompt the main credit bureaus to reassess if medical debts should be included in credit reports.

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This article was originally published on Yahoo Money on August 12, 2022.