What You Should Know
- Hello Patient (Austin, TX) announced that it has acquired Converse Health, an AI workflow automation company built for independent outpatient medical practices.
- Founded in 2023 by CEO Louis Sallerson, CTO Val Zinchenko, and CRO Adam Teitelman (with Trenton Williams joining as VP of Sales in early 2024), Converse Health previously raised $1.3 million to deploy custom chart and document automation across dermatology, orthopedics, women’s health, and pain medicine.
- Directly addresses practice leakage where up to 42% of inbound calls and texts go unanswered during peak hours, compounded by back-office administrative burdens around opening faxes, matching patient charts, chasing prior authorizations, and playing phone tag.
Unifying Front-Desk Voice Agents with Back-Office Chart Automation
Converse Health was founded in 2023 by CEO Louis Sallerson, CTO Val Zinchenko, and CRO Adam Teitelman (with VP of Sales Trenton Williams joining in early 2024), raising $1.3 million to build EHR read/write administrative automation for independent specialty clinics across dermatology, orthopedics, women’s health, and pain medicine. Following the transaction, Sallerson will join Hello Patient as Head of Back-Office and Specialty Products.
The acquisition integrates Converse Health’s EHR read/write engine directly into Hello Patient’s conversational voice, SMS, and web-chat infrastructure, expanding its agentic platform across four core back-office areas:
- Automated Referral & Fax Intake: Agents open incoming digital faxes, identify document types, match or create corresponding patient records in the EHR, and file documents directly where staff expect them. Hello Patient’s outbound agents then immediately follow up via text or call to schedule the visit.
- Chart-Driven Follow-Up & Recall: Rather than making clinical decisions, the system reads existing physician progress notes and incoming lab results to locate unbooked follow-up orders (e.g., a note requesting a three-month return visit), automatically reaching out to schedule overdue patients.
- Prior Authorization Paperwork Assembly: Agents extract patient clinical history and procedure codes from the EHR to draft payer authorization requests. The system routes the prepared packet to practice staff for human review, and agents do not submit directly to payers.
- Records Retrieval & Digital Registration: Automates post-call patient registration, fulfills medical records requests, and retrieves outside diagnostic imaging files.
Operational Impact Across Outpatient Practices
Hello Patient—which integrates natively across ambulatory EHR and practice management platforms including Athenahealth, ModMed, and eClinicalWorks—reports several frontline benchmarks:
- Ortho1 Medical Group (San Diego): Ran the back-office intake automation across 100% of incoming referrals, cutting processing time by 50% and booking 190 referral visits in its initial two months (converting 57% of responding patients with no added administrative headcount).
- Piedmont Urgent Care (Georgia): Deployed agents on its patient billing line to handle over 20,000 monthly calls with zero hold times, resolving approximately half of all inquiries autonomously and retiring its billing voicemail queue in June 2026.
- Pulse-MD Urgent Care (New York): Lifted inbound call answer rates from 73% to 100% within the first 30 days of agent deployment.
- Cross-Client Visit Growth: Across its client base, practices booked 27% more patient visits with the conversational agent managing incoming lines.
“Operations leaders are being forced to bolt AI onto existing systems and buy solutions one task at a time, which is unmanageable. Practices want to redesign their workflows and decision-making around AI agents,” said Alex Cohen, CEO and founder of Hello Patient. “Our AI agents carry real conversations so every call gets answered and patients’ needs are handled from start to finish. Converse Health brings the same automation to the back office, and the busywork stops landing on staff so they can focus on care instead of administrative tasks.”
