Hello Patient Acquires Converse Health to Expand AI Agents Across the Full Patient Conversation, from First Call to Follow-Up

Converse Health agents read incoming referrals, track follow-up, and assemble payer paperwork, expanding Hello Patient's automation from the front office through the back office

AUSTIN, Texas, Sept. 15, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Hello Patient, the agentic AI company reinventing patient communications from the front office to the back office, today announced it has acquired Converse Health, an AI workflow automation company built for outpatient medical practices. Converse Health expands Hello Patient's front-office capabilities with AI agents that handle the document and chart work that surrounds a patient visit. Now high-volume outpatient providers, from primary and urgent care to ENT, dental, and specialty practices, can use Hello Patient to automate much of their administrative work, from the first phone call through the back office.

Converse Health was founded in 2023 by Louis Sallerson, Val Zinchenko, and Adam Teitelman to build custom administrative workflows for independent medical practices in dermatology, women's health, pain medicine, and orthopedics. The company raised $1.3 million and grew to serve dozens of practices.

"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."

Practices lose patients at the front desk. Up to 42% of patient calls and texts go unanswered during busy hours. The back-office work that follows the call is just as costly. A referral arrives as a fax that someone opens, classifies, matches to a patient, and files before any care gets scheduled. A patient calls to schedule a follow-up, hits voicemail, calls back, and gets a busy signal. Staff spend the day playing phone tag with patients, referring offices, and payers, and the appointment never gets booked.

Most of the administrative work in a practice follows a similar workflow: answer the call, route the fax, book the follow-up the chart asked for, send the payer what it wants. Hello Patient now automates the majority of work across a practice's operations, giving staff time back for the patient standing in front of them. Practice leaders also get a single view of how the operation actually runs and one company accountable for it.

"The agents have been a great addition to our practice," said Jeff Craven, COO at Ortho1, an orthopedic group running this back-office technology across 100% of their incoming referrals, successfully scheduling 57% of engaged patients and processing referrals in half the time. "We were inundated with incoming referrals. The agent has shouldered a significant portion of our proactive outreach without requiring any additional support from our staff."

Converse Health provides an AI layer that reads and writes to EHRs and delivers automation in days. The acquisition transforms these back-office capabilities into an agentic workflow using Hello Patient:

• Referral and fax intake — Agents open incoming faxes, identify what each one is, match it to a patient record or create one, and file the document where staff expect to find it.
• Chart-driven follow-up — Agents read the clinical note and incoming labs, find the patients whose follow-up window has passed without an appointment, and reach out to book them.
• Authorization paperwork — Agents pull patient and procedure details from the chart, compose the request for authorization, and route it to staff for review before it reaches the payer.
• Records and registration — Agents complete registration from a phone call, retrieve imaging, and fulfill medical records requests.

"Hello Patient already sits at the front door of thousands of practices, so Converse Health becomes a natural extension," said Sallerson, who joins Hello Patient as product leader for back-office and specialty workflows. "Together, we can deliver these back-office capabilities at real scale and cover a practice's operations end-to-end with one AI layer. Doctors and their staff keep the exam room. We'll convert more patients at the front desk and handle the paperwork before the visit and the follow-up after it."

Converse Health capabilities are available as part of the Hello Patient agentic AI platform now. Read the full story on our website.

About Hello Patient

Hello Patient is a healthcare AI company that runs the operations of outpatient healthcare practices, from the first patient call through the back office. Its AI agents handle every patient conversation, inbound and outbound, across voice, text, and web chat. Agents answer calls, book appointments, run new-patient intake, answer insurance questions, take refill requests, follow up after visits, do recall outreach, convert referrals, and handle billing and collections. Founded in 2024 and based in Austin, Texas, Hello Patient integrates with the EHR, practice management, and CRM systems that healthcare runs on, including ModMed, athenahealth, and eClinicalWorks. Hello Patient is HIPAA-compliant, SOC 2 Type 2 certified, and signs a BAA with every client. Learn more at https://www.hellopatient.com.

Frequently asked questions

What are Hello Patient's AI agents capable of today?

Hello Patient's agents answer calls, book appointments, run new-patient intake, collect payments, take refill requests, and run recall and follow-up outreach across voice, text, and web chat. A call that needs a person reaches the staff with the context attached, and the agents never give medical advice. At Pulse-MD, a multi-location urgent care group in New York, the answer rate went from 73% to 100% in the first 30 days. Across Hello Patient clients, practices booked 27% more patient visits with the agent answering the phones (August 2026 client data).

How do Hello Patient's agents handle billing calls?

Agents run inbound and outbound billing calls and texts. They explain the charges and what insurance covers, walk patients through payment-plan options, and text a secure payment link. Piedmont Urgent Care, the largest urgent care network in Georgia, put a Hello Patient agent on its patient billing line. It answers more than 20,000 billing calls a month, with no hold time, resolving about half of all calls without a person. A disputed charge goes to the billing team as a ticket with the conversation attached. The billing office retired its voicemail box on June 1, 2026.

What back-office work can AI agents take over now?

Four capabilities come over with Converse Health: referral and fax intake, chart-driven follow-up, authorization paperwork, and records and registration. The agent opens an incoming fax, matches it to a patient record or creates one, and files it where staff expect to find it. It reads the clinical note and incoming labs, finds the patients whose follow-up window has passed with nothing booked, and reaches out to book them. For an authorization, it pulls the patient and procedure details from the chart and writes the request; a person reviews it and sends it to the payer, and the agent does not submit.

How do the agents handle referrals?

An agent now handles the referral from the fax to the booked visit. It opens the incoming fax, matches it to the patient record or creates one, and files it. Hello Patient's outbound agent then texts the referred patient and books the visit. At Ortho1 Medical Group, an orthopedic group in San Diego, that outbound agent booked 190 referral visits in its first two months; 57% of the patients who replied booked, with no added staff.

‍Media Contact: 
Roger Villareal
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SOURCE Hello Patient