City / Atlanta

A Georgia Urgent Care System Is Using AI To Handle 20,000 Billing Calls A Month

ATLANTA, July 30 (Hypepotamus) - Piedmont Urgent Care, the largest urgent care network in Georgia that is managed through a joint venture partnership with WellStreet Urgent Care, has replaced its billing voicemail system with an AI agent named Pete. The agent now handles more than 20,000 patient billing calls a month for the network.

Piedmont Urgent Care, which operates 88 urgent care locations in the state, and WellStreet worked with Austin-based startup Hello Patient to build and deploy the agent. Since launch, the company reports that hold times have dropped to zero, and 48% of billing calls are resolved end to end without a staff member picking up the phone.

For Georgia patients, the Hello Patient partnership means less time playing phone tag or staying on hold after an urgent care visit in order to get details about insurance claims or bills.

Tech Square Ventures is an Atlanta-based firm investing in enterprise (B2B) and marketplace technology companies.

Meet Pete

Pete goes further than a typical phone tree or voicemail system. Rather than taking a message for a staff member to return later, the agent carries a call through to a resolved, paid balance. It pulls up a patient's charges, explains what insurance covers, walks the patient through payment options, and collects payment through WellStreet's payment vendor.

The agent was deployed and started taking live calls within 40 days and without the need for the urgent care teams to learn a new system. Piedmont Urgent Care, WellStreet, and Hello Patient first connected at the Urgent Care Assembly, an annual invite-only urgent care conference.

AI Realities In Healthcare

Hello Patient co-founder and CEO Alex Cohen acknowledged that some patients might be skeptical of voice AI in the healthcare space, particularly given prior experiences with automated phone systems from other industries.

"I think that many patients have a negative bias towards voice AI because they've had so many bad support experiences over the phone with big companies. We usually have the AI try to convince them that it's capable and worth talking to but if they still insist on talking to a person, we transfer them to a real human," Cohen told Hypepotamus via email.

Cohen also pointed to how quickly the underlying technology has matured since Hello Patient started in 2024.

"Two and a half years ago when we started, voice AI in health care was not as busy of a space, but at the same time it wasn't apparently obvious that we could even get these agents to work in real time with patients. We just knew that AI looked promising and it unlocked a real opportunity to truly automate the administrative work for the first time ever," Cohen said.

Why the Phone Still Matters in Healthcare

Healthcare organizations have been quick to add scheduling, patient portals, and other digital tools to their workflows over the past several years. But scheduling, refill requests, billing questions, and follow-up care still often start with a phone call. That can easily create a bottleneck for busy front-office staff members who are the first line of fielding those calls.

Beyond billing calls, Hello Patient's platform can deploy agents to handle both inbound and outbound patient conversations across voice, text, and web chat. The company is HIPAA-compliant and SOC 2 Type 2 certified, and specifically designed for the healthcare world.

The startup raised a $22.5 million Series A in 2025 from investors including Alumni Ventures, Bling Capital, 8VC, Flex Capital, and Scale Venture Partners, according to Crunchbase.