Hello Patient Chooses Cartesia to Transform Healthcare Communication

"At Carbon Health, we were handling 30,000 calls per day, with support costs consuming a significant part of revenue. When we discovered Cartesia during their stealth launch, I immediately saw the potential to build what we always wished we had - a conversational AI solution that could handle patient conversations in channels that traditionally required human staff. Looking at their early progress, I thought: if they built this in a few weeks, I can't wait to see day 365 and beyond."

— Alex Cohen, Co-Founder and CEO, Hello Patient

Today, even as medical practices embrace digital transformation, patients still prefer picking up the phone as their primarily modality of communication for talking to healthcare providers

As a result, call centers continue to be one of the biggest operational overhead costs for healthcare companies. This insight, gained from years of leading consumer product teams at Carbon Health, led Alex Cohen to found Hello Patient, which emerged from stealth last week with a mission to revolutionize how medical practices handle patient communications.

During his tenure at Carbon Health, Cohen led three product teams and rebuilt their entire call center infrastructure. The experience revealed a critical gap in healthcare technology: despite building numerous self-service tools, patients consistently chose to call - creating massive operational overhead and stretching support staff thin. Hello Patient emerged as the solution Cohen wished he had at Carbon Health to manage their 30,000+ daily inbound calls efficiently.

Reimagining Patient Communication

Hello Patient stands out through their purpose-built approach to patient-facing workflows. Operating as a fully managed service partner for medium and large healthcare practices, they allow providers to completely outsource their patient communication with peace of mind. The company specializes in clinically administrative workflows including scheduling, patient re-engagement, and patient acquisition

Cohen launched Hello Patient in April of this year after recognizing that multimodal AI models had finally achieved the sophistication needed for personalized patient calls.

"We're building self-service tools for patients, just in the channels they prefer to communicate with healthcare providers - phone and sms.

The latency is there. It sounds realistic. It can actually handle crazy complex edge cases and unstructured inputs from the customer or from the patient, which wasn’t possible until today and still isn’t possible with all CcaaS providers."

Technical Requirements

Hello Patient wanted its voice ai stack to meet several critical requirements

1. Record Response Times: For patient calls, delays directly correlate to dropped appointments and lost revenue. Legacy voice AI systems struggled with convincing response times.
2. Natural-Sounding Voices: The diverse types of patient interactions Hello Patient aimed to automate demanded higher quality than typical AI workflows like prior authorizations or referrals.
3. Accuracy and Stability: To automate sophisticated tasks like handling patient payments and follow-ups, the system needed precision in pronouncing phone numbers, card information, and drug names.
4. Sophisticated Conversation Handling: Traditional Interactive Voice Response Systems (IVRs) were limited by pre-configured phone trees. Modern voice agents require compatibility with advanced AI models across all modes, from large-language-models (LLMs) to text-to-speech (TTS).
5. HIPAA Compliance: Meeting healthcare's strict requirements for handling Patient Health Information (PHI) securely.

The Cartesia Solution

After discovering Cartesia during its Twitter launch, Cohen immediately recognized it as the right solution, offering:

• Industry-Leading Responsiveness: Sonic achieves 90ms latency, enabling natural dialogue without the awkward pauses typical of automated systems.
• Ultra-Realistic Voice Quality: Sonic's voices are nearly indistinguishable from human coordinators, allowing Hello Patient to be a seamless extension of healthcare practices' brands.
• Contextual Accuracy: Sonic's models are custom-trained to handle complex pronunciations of phone numbers, credit card information, and prescription drugs through custom pronunciation support.
• Multimodal Compatibility: Seamless integration with LiveKit enables full-loop conversations combining Sonic with leading transcription and large-language models.
• Robust Security: Full HIPAA compliance ensures trusted handling of patient data and no persisting of protected health information.

Results

Hello Patient is already delivering measurable value:

• Cost Reduction: Programmatic calling and texting eliminates wasted staff time on voicemails, potentially saving up to 13% of previous support costs.
• Improved Conversion: Immediate handling of inbound calls increases task completion and revenue recovery compared to waitlist or callback systems.
• Staff Optimization: Eliminates training costs, staff turnover, and administrative overhead, allowing support staff to focus on high-value patient interactions.

We're excited to congratulate Hello Patient on their emergence from stealth with a $6.3 million seed funding round backed by prominent investors including 8VC, Bling Capital, Max Ventures, and more.

The partnership between Hello Patient and Cartesia marks a new chapter in healthcare communication. With health systems already identifying this as a top priority for 2025, and Hello Patient's early success across imaging centers, clinics, and virtual care providers, they're demonstrating how AI can transform healthcare operations while maintaining the personal touch patients expect.

"We knew Cartesia could be an incredible tool to simplify the everyday patient communication that happens in our health system, improving patient experience and saving our collective, valuable time. Alex's deep healthcare expertise has been invaluable in shaping our technology for this critical market. Hello Patient's no-nonsense approach to helping customers understand and solve this difficult problem, combined with their laser focus on patient-facing workflows, creates exactly the kind of practical, scalable solution that healthcare has been waiting for. We can’t wait to see how they change the landscape of healthcare communication over the next decade."

— Karan Goel, CEO, Cartesia