Hello Patient helps medical practices run leaner, grow faster, and deliver better care by handling end-to-end patient communications across voice, text, and chat. Gone are the days of patients calling in at their time of need only to get stuck in a queue and left on hold. Hello Patient’s AI agent works 24/7 to answer questions, schedule appointments, and more. It’s a win-win: patients get care faster and healthcare practices grow their top line.
We’ve all been there: you go see your primary care doctor for a weird skin thing. You need a referral to a dermatologist and instead of seeing a doctor you’re stuck waiting on hold and playing phone tag with the front desk. Three calls and an hour later, you decide that your rash will probably go away on its own (maybe?) and you give up. Or, you’ve finally decided to go see a doctor and figure out why your throat gets all itchy every time you eat a PB&J, googled around, found an allergist that maybe takes your insurance and called them, only to be met with a call center whose employees are trying really hard but just can’t seem to verify your insurance or, worse, an answering machine that’s probably not monitored.
It’s obvious that healthcare has an access problem, not a provider discovery problem. It’s that second step of verifying a doc takes your insurance or actually getting on their calendar where patients drop off and ultimately don’t get the care they need. In B2B software, this would be quickly diagnosed as “over-investment in top-of-funnel and a mid- and bottom-funnel conversion problem.” However, healthcare has neither the vocabulary to describe nor the tooling to solve these issues, so they remain rampant.
The brutal reality that outpatient healthcare groups are high CAC, low retention services businesses that have okay-at-best resources for top-of-funnel patient acquisition and nothing through the rest of the funnel. A practice might spend thousands on patient marketing, but once a patient calls in, all the tech is out the window and it’s up to an overworked $20 / hour employee to convert the patient. Retaining and reactivating patients is worse. Think back again to your own experiences: when was the last time you received something from a provider that was more than an automated, “It’s been six months, remember to come in for your follow-up!” Combine that with competition from health systems, and outpatient groups from two doc practices all the way up to enterprise-scale, national organizations are struggling to grow profitably and sustainably.
Alex Cohen intimately understands that reality. Prior to founding Hello Patient, Alex led consumer product and growth at Carbon Health and was laser focused on profitably acquiring and retaining patients. That experience led to several hard-earned insights that are at the core of Hello Patient. The first is that “patient engagement” isn’t just getting patients in the door, it’s the entire experience end-to-end, from the moment a patient asks a question to when they’re booking an appointment to when they’re paying their bill. Every touchpoint is a moment to delight and a moment they could churn. The second is that “patient engagement” is inherently multimodal and highly dependent on specialty and patient population: complex specialties and those serving older adults are probably more phone centric; simpler appointments and younger patients will lean more towards SMS. The final is that for all the ways that healthcare is its own beast, basic consumer marketing principles still apply and practices can create a lot of value by dialing in their onboarding flow, nurture sequence, etc., just like a consumer technology company would.
Hello Patient is quickly becoming the category-defining patient engagement platform that helps practices meet patients where they are across voice, text, and chat. In under a year since their launch, Hello Patient has already helped customers place over 100,000 phone calls and complete over 300,000 conversations. We’re incredibly excited to partner with Alex and the rest of the Hello Patient team as they build out a new core healthcare system that makes patients the top priority.
