At WellStreet’s Georgia network, Piedmont Urgent Care, more than 20,000 patient billing calls a month are now answered with no hold time, freeing close to 1,000 staff hours a month.
AUSTIN, Texas, July 9, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Piedmont Urgent Care, the largest network of urgent cares in Georgia with 88 locations, has retired the voicemail box on its centralized billing line and now answers every patient billing call around the clock, using an AI agent built by Hello Patient. The agent went live in 40 days. It now handles more than 20,000 billing calls a month with no hold time and resolves around 48% of them with no staff involvement, freeing close to 1,000 staff hours a month.
Key results
- Went live in 40 days
- 20,000+ patient billing calls handled per month
- Hold times down to zero
- Reached 48% containment in 3 months
- Around-the-clock coverage with reduced hours
“When you come into urgent care, you’re focused on getting the care you need. The bill comes later, and by then you have questions that deserve real answers. Most groups can’t staff enough people for that call volume, so we built an agent that can handle it,” said Alex Cohen, CEO of Hello Patient. “There’s so much craft in how the agent explains a copay versus a deductible, how it handles a frustrated patient, and how it takes a confusing bill and breaks it down so people actually understand it. We’ve put a ton of effort and a lot of love into making these agents empathetic, and you can hear it in how patients respond on WellStreet’s line.”
The challenge
WellStreet’s billing call center had a volume problem with a familiar shape. During business hours, patients waited on hold, up to five minutes, to ask routine questions about a charge or a balance. Outside business hours, the line went to voicemail, messages stacked up over weekends, and a patient with a simple question could spend two days playing phone tag.
A centralized billing office serving a multi-state urgent care operator absorbs enormous, spiky call volume, and almost all of it lands inside the same nine-hour window. Billing calls carry direct revenue weight. A patient who can’t get an answer about a confusing charge puts off paying, disputes the bill, or never pays at all.
What an AI billing call center agent does
After WellStreet partnered with Hello Patient to put an AI billing call center agent on the billing line, its patients stopped waiting. The agent, which Piedmont Urgent Care patients know as Pete, verifies the caller and looks up their bill without an account number, explains the charges and what insurance covers, walks the patient through the payment-plan options the office allows, and texts a secure payment link so the balance gets paid on the call. When a question needs a person, it creates a ticket with the conversation attached and routes it to the billing team, so nothing waits in a voicemail box.
Hello Patient builds for healthcare and nothing else. It is HIPAA-compliant, SOC 2 Type 2 certified, and signs a BAA with every practice, and the agent never gives medical advice.
The impact
The agent now handles more than 20,000 billing calls a month with no hold time and resolves around 48% of them end-to-end, with no staff involvement. The share of weekday calls it handled completely on its own rose for six straight weeks, from 35.9% to 48.0%, as the team trained it on more workflows. Taking that phone work off the team freed close to 1,000 staff hours a month, now spent on disputed charges, payment plans, and complex claims. When the agent texts a payment link, 40% of patients pay on the spot.
On June 1, 2026, WellStreet standardized its billing call center to 8 AM to 5 PM weekdays across all four states and officially retired voicemail, with the agent answering every call around the clock.
“We retired voicemail because our patients deserved more than a callback queue and our hard-working agents deserved more impactful work than playing phone tag back and forth with little to show for it. When we launched Hello Patient and sunset our voicemail system, the shift was immediate — our team stopped managing overnight and weekend call backlog and started delivering in-the-moment care,” said Alise Cartledge, Director of Patient Financial Experience at WellStreet Urgent Care.
What’s next
WellStreet is now expanding into outbound bill-pay campaigns, inbound billing for its other three markets, and inbound answering for the clinics themselves. To learn more about how an AI agent runs a patient billing line, read the full guide here or book a call today.
Methodology: Results cover the agent’s first three months on Piedmont Urgent Care by WellStreet’s billing line (March to June 2026), a single centralized billing office serving the Georgia market. Call volume, containment, and payment rates are from Hello Patient analytics; the hold-time baseline is from WellStreet’s pre-deployment phone data. Staff hours returned assume four minutes saved on each billing call the agent resolves on its own and two minutes saved on each one it passes to staff with context. Across the monthly volume, that comes to nearly 1,000 hours a month, or almost 12,000 hours a year.
About Piedmont Urgent Care by WellStreet
Piedmont Urgent Care, managed through a joint venture partnership with WellStreet Urgent Care, is the largest network of urgent cares in Georgia with 88 locations. Piedmont Urgent Care’s services include treatment of non-life-threatening illnesses and injuries, on-site x-ray, laceration repair, lab services, EKG, medication dispensing, and more.
About Hello Patient
Hello Patient is a healthcare AI company whose 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 healthcare already 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
Why are urgent care groups and health systems putting AI agents on their billing lines?
Because the billing line is where holds and weekend backlogs pile up fastest, and every one of those calls is a patient trying to pay a bill. A centralized billing office can take tens of thousands of calls a month into a single team, and the ones that hit hold music or voicemail turn into late payments and disputes. Hello Patient builds AI agents that answer every billing call the moment it comes in, resolve the routine questions on the call, and hand the rest to a biller with the full conversation attached. Piedmont Urgent Care put one on its billing line and now answers more than 20,000 calls a month there with no hold time.
Can a single AI agent handle billing calls for a practice with dozens of locations across several states?
Yes. A centralized billing office answers the calls for every location on one line, and the agent sits on that line the way the team does. Piedmont Urgent Care, the largest network of urgent cares in Georgia with 88 locations, runs its billing through one such office, and WellStreet operates that billing line across four states. Their Hello Patient agent answers more than 20,000 patient billing calls a month, resolving about half with no staff involvement. The agent verifies each caller, looks up the bill without an account number, explains the charges and what insurance covers, and texts a secure payment link. When a call needs a person, it routes to the billing team as a ticket with the full conversation attached.
What makes the billing line a good first place for a healthcare group to add an AI agent?
The billing line is a strong first place for three reasons. It takes high call volume into one team. Most of those calls are the same routine questions, about a charge, a balance, insurance, or how to pay. And it has hours the office cannot fully staff, like nights and weekends. The routine calls are the ones a Hello Patient agent resolves on the spot, which frees the billers for disputed charges and complex claims. The after-hours gap makes the case stronger, because a line that used to go to voicemail now gets answered around the clock. Piedmont Urgent Care went live on its billing line in 40 days and retired voicemail across four states.
Is an AI agent that handles patient calls HIPAA-compliant?
Yes. Hello Patient is HIPAA-compliant, SOC 2 Type 2 certified, and signs a Business Associate Agreement with every client. Patient calls carry protected health information, balances, and coverage details, so the BAA is what permits an agent to handle those conversations at all. The agent works inside those rules on every call. It logs every interaction for the billing team to review, follows the protocols the practice sets, and never gives medical advice. Payment data stays out of the conversation entirely, because the agent texts a secure payment link and the payment runs on the practice’s own payment system. No card number gets spoken aloud. Ask any vendor about this early. Ask for the BAA, the SOC 2 report, and how call logs are stored and reviewed before a pilot takes its first patient call.
Media Contact Tolga Demirsar, Hello Patient, marketing@hellopatient.com
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SOURCE Hello Patient
