Piedmont Urgent Care retires billing voicemail and answers every call 24/7

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.

WellStreet supports billing with a centralized billing office answering patient billing calls including questions about charges, insurance, balances, and how to pay. Every call comes from a patient trying to pay their bill, and how quickly they get an answer to their questions determines how soon it gets paid.

Executive Summary

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.

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, 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, freeing close to 1,000 staff hours a month. The team now spends those hours on more complex work, such as handling disputed charges and complex claims.

WellStreet went from kickoff to live calls in 40 days. On June 1, 2026, it set its staffed billing hours to 8 AM to 5 PM weekdays and retired the voicemail box for good, with the agent answering every call around the clock.

The Challenge

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. The team worked hard and still couldn't cover every hour: patients held during peaks, and after 6 PM or on a Saturday, the only thing answering the billing line was a voicemail box.

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. The data made the gap concrete:

• 20,000+ patient billing calls a month flowing into one centralized office
• Hold times that reach five minutes during peak volume
• Zero resolution available outside business hours

Piedmont Urgent Care needed every billing call answered the moment it came in, the routine ones resolved on the spot, and the complex ones handed to staff with context, without changing how the billing team works.

Why Hello Patient

Hello Patient builds AI agents that handle every patient conversation, from the front desk to the back-office billing line. No two billing operations run the same way, each with its own rules, hours, and edge cases. It takes a team that knows how healthcare groups actually run to put it to work. WellStreet went from kickoff to live patient calls in 40 days.

Three things made the decision:

1. Billing depth.
Phone tools take a message and leave the bill for a person to handle later. Hello Patient's agent carries the call all the way to a paid balance. It pulls up the charges, explains what insurance covered, walks the patient through a payment plan, and collects through WellStreet's payment vendor.

2. Speed of deployment.
Hello Patient connected to Piedmont Urgent Care/WellStreet's billing data and ticketing and had the agent taking live calls in 40 days, with no new system for the team to learn. It got better every week after that, handling more of each call on its own as the team tuned what it covered.

3. Healthcare-only focus.
‍Hello Patient builds for healthcare and nothing else, so the agent shows up understanding how a billing line runs, follows the protocols the practice sets, and logs every interaction. Hello Patient is HIPAA-compliant, SOC 2 Type 2 certified, and signs a BAA with every practice, and the agent never gives medical advice.

{alise-cartledge-1}

The Impact

The first three months, in numbers

{stat-cards}

Patients who used to hold for five minutes to reach the billing office now get answered the moment they call, regardless of time or day, and the hold queue during business hours shrank because routine calls never enter it.

{callout-cards}

What the agent does on those calls is the reason containment keeps climbing. It can:

• Verify the caller and look up their bill without an account number.
• Explain the charges and what their insurance covers.
• Walk through payment-plan options and text a secure payment link.
• When a question needs a person, create a ticket automatically and route it to the billing team, so nothing waits in a voicemail box.

Three months in, containment continues to climb week over week as the agent learns and is trained on more workflows and edge cases. Weekday containment rose for six straight weeks, from 35.9% to 48.0%.

On June 1, WellStreet standardized its billing call center to 8 AM to 5 PM weekdays across all four states, down from a 7:30 AM to 6 PM window, and officially retired voicemail.

The team now concentrates on the hours when call volume peaks, as the agent covers every hour outside them, and the call center's total operating expense came down while patient access expanded to around the clock.

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.

For urgent care operators and health systems looking at their own billing queues, Piedmont Urgent Care's first three months are a clear blueprint: answer every call instantly, resolve the routine majority on the spot, and turn the rest into tracked work instead of voicemail.

To see how an AI agent runs a patient billing line, read the full guide or book a call today. For the front desk side of urgent care, the Pulse MD case study shows how that network cut missed calls from 26% to zero in 30 days. Bring your call volume, and we'll walk through what the first three months look like at your numbers.

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. 

Frequently asked questions

How does an AI agent answer patient billing calls at a centralized billing office?

An AI agent on a centralized billing line picks up every call the moment it comes in, verifies the caller, and looks up their bill without an account number. Hello Patient builds AI agents for patient conversations, including billing-line agents for centralized offices where one team answers the calls for dozens of locations. On the call, the agent explains the charges and what insurance covers, walks through the payment-plan options the office allows, and texts a secure payment link so the balance gets paid on the spot.

When a call needs a human, the agent creates a ticket with the conversation attached and routes it to the billing team, so nothing waits in a voicemail box. The team starts every complex call with the whole story in front of it.

Centralized offices are usually the first to add one, because one line absorbing tens of thousands of calls a month is where holds and weekend backlogs pile up fastest.

What results should a healthcare billing call center expect from an AI agent in its first three months?

A healthcare billing call center can expect every call to be answered with no hold time once the agent is live. A growing share then gets resolved end-to-end as the agent learns the office's workflows. Piedmont Urgent Care by WellStreet, a Hello Patient client, shows what that looks like. In its first three months, the agent answered more than 20,000 billing calls a month and resolved around 48% of them, with no staff involvement.

The resolution rate climbed as the office tuned the agent. Weekday containment, the share of calls the agent handles end-to-end, 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. And when the agent texted a payment link, 40% of patients paid on the spot.

The exact numbers move with call volume and workflows. Hold time and after-hours coverage change at launch, and the resolution rate builds over the first months.

Does an AI agent on a practice's billing line replace its billing team?

No. The agent takes the routine, repetitive call work off the billing team, like the questions about a charge, a balance, or a payment that fill most of the queue. With Hello Patient on the line, the calls that need judgment still reach a human, routed as tickets with the full conversation attached.

The team's hours move to different work. At a high-volume billing office, routine calls bury the complex work, the disputed charge, and the claim that takes an hour to untangle. When the agent absorbs the routine majority, those hours come back for the work that needs a trained biller.

A biller working a disputed charge recovers more for the practice than a biller reading a balance off a screen, and the balance question still gets answered the moment the patient calls.

What happens when a patient's billing call is too complex for the agent?

Hello Patient's agent hands the call to a human. It creates a ticket with the full conversation attached and routes it to the billing team, so the biller who picks it up starts with the whole story instead of a voicemail message.

The practice draws the line between routine and complex. The agent follows the protocols the billing team sets for what it handles on its own and what it escalates, like a disputed charge or a request outside the rules it was given. Every interaction is logged, so the team can review any call and adjust those protocols as the agent takes on more.

Clinical questions route to a human as well, and the agent never gives medical advice. Routine calls get resolved on the spot, and the complex ones become tracked work the team picks up with the whole story attached.

Is an AI agent handling patient billing calls HIPAA-compliant?

Yes. Hello Patient is HIPAA-compliant, SOC 2 Type 2 certified, and signs a Business Associate Agreement with every client. Billing calls carry protected health information, the balances and the 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.

How long does it take to get an AI agent live at a medical billing call center?

A medical billing call center can go live in weeks. Hello Patient connects to the billing data and ticketing the office already runs on, with no new system for the billing team to learn.

The setup work sits mostly on Hello Patient's side. Its team wires the data connections, configures the secure payment link, and builds the escalation rules. The office's part is deciding what the agent handles on its own and what it hands to the team, and that shapes the first few weeks after launch too.

Going live is the start. The agent handles more of each call as the team tunes what it covers, which is why resolution rates climb over the first months instead of starting at their peak.

What happens to patient billing calls that come in after the office closes?

They get answered. Hello Patient's agent picks up the billing line around the clock. Voicemail exists to catch the calls that come in when no one can answer. With the agent answering every hour, nothing is left for the box to catch.

A patient who calls about a balance on a weekend gets the charge explained on that call. The agent texts a secure payment link while they're on the phone. A call that needs a human becomes a ticket for the billing team, with the conversation already attached. The team works it when staffed hours begin. Nothing stacks up overnight, and nobody spends the next morning returning messages.

The agent also changes the staffing math. It covers every hour outside the staffed window. The office can put its team on the hours when call volume peaks.

Will patients actually talk to an AI agent about their medical bills?

Patients do, at scale. On Piedmont Urgent Care's billing line, the agent Hello Patient built answers more than 20,000 patient billing calls a month, and about 48% get resolved end-to-end with no staff involvement. That only happens because callers stay on and finish the conversation.

A billing call is a stressful one. So the agent verifies the caller, looks up the bill without an account number, and explains the charge and what insurance covers in plain language. It answers the real question fast, with no hold and no menu. When a patient owes a balance, it texts a secure payment link, and at Piedmont 40% pay on the spot.

The proof is in the behavior. Weekday containment climbed for six straight weeks, from 35.9% to 48.0%, as patients kept letting the agent finish the call. Anything that needs a person routes to a biller with the full conversation attached. The agent never gives medical advice.

‍