Carbon Health eliminates missed calls and drives revenue after-hours

About Carbon Health

Carbon Health operates 81 urgent care and primary care clinics across the U.S., known for their tech-forward approach to accessible, modern healthcare.

Executive Summary

Challenge: When clinics close, phones go unanswered. After-hours staff is expensive, and patients seeking urgent care won't wait—they'll go somewhere else.

Solution: Hello Patient deployed Mia - our AI agent - to handle 100% of after-hours inbound calls, send booking links, and capture patient intent when staff aren't available.

Results: Zero missed calls during after-hours, 40% booking conversion from patients who receive links—unlocking potentially tens of thousands of appointments per year across 81 locations.

The Challenge

For urgent care, every missed call is a lost patient. When someone calls after hours with a sick kid or a sudden injury, they're not leaving a voicemail—they're calling the next clinic or heading to the ER.

Before Hello Patient, Carbon Health faced the same tradeoff every urgent care operator knows: staff the phones around the clock (expensive, hard to train, and hard to scale) or accept that after-hours calls go unanswered.

‍The urgent care dilemma:
‍Patients calling after hours need immediate answers—they won't wait. Staffing nights, weekends, and holidays is cost-prohibitive. Every unanswered call is revenue walking out the door to a competitor.

Why Hello Patient

Carbon Health's CEO, Kerem Ozkay, championed the partnership after recognizing Hello Patient's unique position in the market: a team with deep experience in urgent care operations.

‍1. Urgent care domain expertise:


Hello Patient's founding team brings first-hand experience running urgent care operations, giving them an unmatched understanding of patient workflows, scheduling complexity, and the realities of operating at scale.

‍2. Purpose-built for urgent care:
Mia isn't a generic voice bot adapted for healthcare. Unlike staff, the AI only has to be trained once on specific urgent care workflows—triage questions, appointment booking, waitlist management, and appropriate escalation.

‍3. Performance that proves it:
‍In a space full of voice AI claims, Hello Patient delivers measurable results. 40% of patients who receive booking links convert to scheduled appointments—with up to 34% completing visits—before EHR integration has even been implemented.

The Impact

The results exceeded Carbon Health’s expectations across multiple dimensions:

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The transformation went far beyond metrics. Carbon Health saw four major operational improvements, including positive impacts on speed and scale.

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What's Next?

Hello Patient's platform supports full scheduling and waitlist management—adding patients directly into the EHR without requiring a booking link. 
Carbon Health is rolling out deeper integration to unlock these capabilities across all locations.

They’re also expanding Hello Patient to full after-hours coverage across all 93 clinics, plus overflow coverage during the day.

The roadmap leads to Hello Patient becoming Carbon Health’s primary phone line for scheduling—with full EHR integration enabling direct booking and waitlist management at scale.

‍For urgent care operators the Carbon Health partnership proves what's possible when AI is built specifically for urgent care:

Major Takeaway

No more choosing between expensive staffing and missed calls. Patients are served instantly, even when clinics are dark. This is a scalable model that transforms after-hours 
from a cost center into a revenue driver.

Frequently asked questions

What happens to urgent care calls after the clinic closes?‍

Most after-hours calls go to voicemail or a paid answering service, and for urgent care that usually means a lost patient. Someone with a sick kid or a sudden injury won't leave a message. They call the next clinic or head to the ER. Hello Patient builds AI agents that answer those calls the moment they come in, so the phone still gets picked up when the front desk is gone.

The agent answers the caller's questions, texts a booking link, and captures what the patient needs so the morning team isn't starting cold. It covers nights, weekends, and holidays without anyone staffing the phones. When a call needs a person, the agent hands off with the full context of the conversation, and it never gives medical advice. The result is coverage that used to require an expensive overnight team.

How does an AI agent turn an after-hours call into a booked appointment?

Answering the call is only half the job. The patient still needs a time on the schedule, and a message left overnight often never gets a callback. With Hello Patient on the line, the agent handles the whole thing in one conversation: it answers the caller's questions, then texts a booking link the patient can tap right there to pick a slot.

That link is what closes the loop while the patient is still paying attention. It works before any EHR integration is in place, so a practice can start capturing after-hours demand without waiting on a technical project. In Carbon Health's case, 40% of patients who get a booking link go on to book, worth more than 10,000 appointments a year across 81 locations. Those are visits that used to leak away overnight.

Do patients actually book from an after-hours text, or do they wait to call back?

They book. The worry is fair, since plenty of automated systems just fire off a text that nobody acts on. What changes the outcome is timing: the link arrives during the call, while the patient is still thinking about the visit they need. Hello Patient's agents send it in that moment, not hours later.

The evidence is in the conversion. Across Carbon Health's after-hours calls, 40% of patients who receive a booking link go on to book an appointment, and up to 34% complete a visit. A patient who waits to call back in the morning often doesn't, so catching the intent overnight is where the bookings come from. The agent answers the call, sends the link, and lets the patient self-serve on their own time, which is why the number holds.

Can an AI agent cover after-hours calls before we connect it to our EHR?

Yes. A common assumption is that an AI phone agent needs a deep EHR hookup before it can do anything useful, so teams delay the whole project. Hello Patient's agents don't wait on that. They answer calls, answer patient questions, and text booking links from day one, with the integration added later.

This matters because the after-hours leak is happening now, every night the phones go unanswered. The agent can start covering the calls and sending booking links before any EHR work is done, so you capture the demand while you scope the deeper setup. Integration comes next and lets the agent book directly into the EHR without a link in the middle, working with the systems a practice already runs. The coverage and the bookings start well before that step, so you don't lose patients waiting on a technical project.

What does after-hours phone coverage cost compared with staffing nights and weekends?

Staffing the phones overnight is the expensive option, and for most urgent care groups it's the reason after-hours calls go unanswered at all. An overnight team is hard to hire, hard to train, and hard to scale across locations, so the phones get left to voicemail instead. Hello Patient's agents cover that window without adding a single overnight hire.

The economics shift because one agent covers every location's after-hours line at once and answers every call that comes in. Instead of paying for staffed coverage that still misses calls, a practice captures the bookings those calls carry. That turns after-hours from a cost you carry into appointments you keep, and it ends the choice between expensive staffing and missed calls. Bring your call volume to a conversation and we'll model what it would look like for your group.

Is it safe to leave an AI agent answering patient calls overnight?

Yes, and it's built for exactly that. The concern is real: nobody wants an automated line giving bad answers when there's no one around to catch it. Hello Patient's agents are built for healthcare and trained on the specific workflows a practice runs, so they stay inside what they're supposed to handle and escalate the rest.

The agent answers questions, books appointments, and handles the routine overnight volume. When a call needs a person, it hands off with the full context of the conversation, and it never gives medical advice. Hello Patient is HIPAA-compliant, SOC 2 Type 2 certified, and signs a BAA with every account, so the compliance floor is the same overnight as it is during the day. Every interaction is logged, so the morning team can see exactly what came in while the clinic was dark.

What does the agent capture overnight for the morning team?

Every after-hours call turns into a clean record instead of a voicemail someone has to decode. When a patient calls, Hello Patient's agent logs who called, what they needed, and what happened on the call, so nothing depends on a staff member piecing it together the next day.

That means the team starts the morning with a complete picture of the night. They can see who booked, who got a link and hasn't tapped it yet, and who needs a callback. The patient doesn't have to repeat themselves, and the front desk isn't working backward from a stack of messages. Because the agent answers every call and records each one, the overnight window stops being a black hole and becomes a queue the team can act on. Every interaction is logged and ready to pick up.