When AI Answers Your Doctor's Phone

For the office manager at your doctor’s office, it’s not about having an "AI strategy." It’s about answering the phone during the 8am rush, or patients hanging up before anyone picks up.

Alex Cohen used to run product at Carbon Health, where he first tried to solve that problem with call-center software. Now he's co-founder of Hello Patient, where AI agents answer the phone, book appointments, and handle insurance and billing calls for healthcare clinics.

On this episode, he lays out the three rules his team won't break when they put AI in front of a patient. He also explains why the hardest part of any AI rollout isn't the AI; it's the 20% of the work that every clinic does differently. And he gives a direct answer to the question every operator actually has: what do I need to check before AI can touch my own systems?

No strategy decks. No jargon. Just what it takes to run AI inside a business that can't afford to get it wrong.

Topics covered:

• What Hello Patient's AI agents actually do inside a healthcare clinic
• The three non-negotiable rules for deploying AI in a clinical setting
• How to actually get AI-ready (EMR access, APIs, compliance)

Chapters:

• (00:00) Introduction
• (01:00) Alex Cohen: From Carbon Health to Hello Patient's Origin Story
• (06:03) Finding the Pattern: Building the First Voice AI
• (08:05) From Manual IVRs to Agentic AI
• (12:14) What Hello Patient Actually Does
• (14:15) Rule #1 — No Clinical AI Without a Human in the Loop
• (20:49) Rule #2 — Never Let AI Pretend to Be Human
• (27:01) Rule #3 — Don't Try to Automate 100% of Calls
• (29:44) The Last-Mile Problem: Why the Final 20% Is 90% of the Work
• (33:25) Why EMRs Aren't Commoditized Like Your CRM
• (34:58) How to Actually Get AI-Ready
• (37:08) Why Some Systems Won't Give You API Access
• (38:33) HIPAA, Compliance, and Where AI Actually Helps
• (40:57) Where to Find Alex & Hello Patient

Resources:

Valet — Episode Sponsor

Valet is the founding sponsor of the Serious People Podcast.

AI is getting very good at making useful things: dashboards, analyses, internal websites, and small tools. Making those things available to the rest of a team is a separate problem.

Valet lets you publish AI-created artifacts to a stable URL. New sites are private by default, and members of your organization can access them after signing in.

Try Valet at https://valet.dev

Connect with Alex on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexander-cohen/

Follow Hello Patient on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/hello-patient/

Connect with Noah on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/noahlevin/

Noah’s Website: https://www.noahlevin.com/

Serious People Website: https://seriouspeople.ai/