Startup Hello Patient raised $22.5 million in series A funding as it continues to scale up its generative artificial intelligence agents to handle patient communications for medical practices.
Scale Venture Partners led the series A round with participation from 8VC, Bling Capital, Max Ventures, Remus Capital and FirstLook Partners. The startup is now valued at $100 million, according to Alex Cohen, CEO and founder of Hello Patient.
The company has grown substantially in the past nine months and now powers 10,000 to 20,000 provider-patient conversations per day, up from hundreds per day back in October, Cohen said in an interview.
Hello Patient built generative AI call agents to do the work of traditional support staff at outpatient medical practices, freeing up for staff more valuable, patient-facing work.
"We are going deep on a few different specialties. Urgent care is a big focus of ours, ENT and allergy, and then we're starting to do a lot of primary care," Cohen said. The company works with medical practices in dermatology, orthopedics, ENT and urgent care as well as med spas and veterinary clinics.
The Hello Patient platform handles end-to-end patient conversations across voice, text and chat. The company's AI agents manage real conversations around the clock. They book appointments, answer questions and reengage patients while meeting healthcare’s strict privacy and security standards, according to the company.
"We're still one of the only few that's doing phone calling, texting and chatbot across both inbound and outbound use cases," Cohen said. "We're seeing a lot of pull in the market now, and we're ramping up sales and marketing."
In less than a year, Hello Patient has powered more than 100,000 phone calls and 300,000 patient conversations. The platform helps outpatient groups convert more inbound leads, improve retention and reactivate patients, all while reducing administrative burden, executives said.
The company does not build foundational AI or voice AI software but uses existing software and then fine-tunes its model specifically for healthcare practices and front-end administrative work.
Cohen spent about four years at Carbon Health running consumer and growth product teams and wanted to build better patient engagement experiences for other healthcare practices. He brought over a team from Carbon Health to start the new healthcare AI startup to automate patient-facing communication work. The AI support agents are used for clinically administrative, nonmedical workflows, and the technology is HIPAA-compliant.
In October, Hello Patient picked up $6.3 million in seed funding backed by 8VC, Bling Capital and Max Ventures as well as angel investors Ellen DaSilva, founder of Summer Health; Russell Fradin, previously vice chairman of Carbon Health; Shrav Mehta, founder of Secureframe; and Swapnil Jain, founder of Observe.AI, among others.
The conversational AI market in healthcare is getting more competitive as a growing list of companies aims to automate patient communications for providers. Assort Health, a specialty-specific AI platform for managing patient phone calls, raised $26 million back in April and then picked up a $50 million series B round at a valuation of $750 million last month, Tech Crunch reported.
EliseAI, a company that initially started as an AI company automating communications in the rental and leasing industry, made a move to break into healthcare, seeing opportunities to use AI to tackle administrative tasks. The New York-based company picked up $250 million in series E funding led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) to fuel its growth.
Cohen noticed the competition heating up and decided it was time to boost sales and marketing efforts as well as invest in its engineering and implementation teams. Hello Patient will use the new funding to continue to expand its product capabilities and scale its reach to healthcare organizations.
"With where the market is, every healthcare provider or group has just an AI strategy right now, especially on the AI for the patient front. We want to be able to serve and deliver for all the folks that are reaching out to us. These things are still so early that it's all very much a partnership, and it's a 'crawl, walk, run' approach with everyone," he said. "We needed additional headcount to support the capacity."
The startup's approach is part of a paradigm shift where AI companies are offering service as software, Cohen told Fierce Healthcare back in October.
"I'm a big believer that the right way to do this is through a managed services business. We're not building SaaS. I believe we can do this as a service-as-software model where what was traditionally a services business now has software margins because I don't have to go employ a whole bunch of people to do the services under the hood," Cohen noted.
Even as the world is going digital, medical practice staff still spend a lot of time communicating over the phone. Front-office staff handle a large volume of calls and texts to patients for appointment scheduling, referral follow-ups and prescription refills.
It's time-consuming and inefficient for practices while also contributing to administrative overhead.
Many startups see opportunities to use AI to tackle these front-office tasks, and generative AI technology has evolved to the point that it can be used for more complex conversations to handle tasks like appointment scheduling and answering patient concerns, Cohen said.
But, he noted that it's challenging for companies to jump into healthcare, while Hello Patient has the technical and operational experience to work with medical practices.
"It's quite tremendously hard to get into healthcare. Just given the amount of tribal knowledge and workflow experience that you need to get, even for an EMT practice, live, it just has to be a part of your DNA. What we're seeing is companies that are trying to launch voice and conversational AI are really struggling with deployments," he said. "That work requires just sort of a magic and a muscle that I think a lot of folks don't realize that they need when they venture into this work and into this feature set."
He added, "We're seeing the EHRs [electronic health records] have their own flair or flavor of this work, and even then, it's not in their DNA. They've never been good at patient engagement. They've been great at billing and charting. With patient engagement, I think people underestimate the work that goes into getting these things working reliably and handling real use cases."
Cohen asserts that Hello Patient has developed the most advanced conversational AI "purpose-built" for healthcare.
"A lot of folks have built very deterministic products. They're building what really will look like phone trees, but they happen to use AI to understand what the patient is saying, but they're not conversational. We have been fully generative and conversational from day one. We just rolled out multi-agent architecture, which makes it so that we can do pretty complex workflows reliably," he said. "It's just a big expansion game for us now. We have a lot of folks on the implementation docket. The sales pipeline is pretty full, and you're going to see us hire a lot to keep up with that demand right now."
Hello Patient is tackling a real operational bottleneck in healthcare by addressing the communication challenges between patients and providers, said Jeremy Kaufmann, partner at Scale Venture Partners. “Hello Patient stands out as the category-defining patient engagement platform, with an experienced team and early customer traction that prove AI can fix the access gap in healthcare," Kaufmann said in a statement.