Startup Assort Health developed an outbound AI agent that can proactively reach out to patients to automate appointment rescheduling, close open referrals, tackle payment collections and accelerate flu shot outreach.
The AI agent, called Assort Activate, is already in use across more than 1,000 providers and can enhance patient access without increasing staff, according to executives.
Assort Health launched in November 2023 with specialty-specific, agentic AI voice agents to support practices, from orthopedics to cardiology to immunology, to triage incoming patient calls by answering frequently asked questions and routing patients to the right individual in the clinic. Assort embeds into the provider’s electronic health record and practice management software to schedule appointments and quickly resolve issues for patients.
The startup is now extending its agents platform for the entire care journey, executives said.
Assort's Activate feature enables health systems, federally qualified health centers, primary care practices and specialty provider groups to book more appointments, accelerate payment collection and close critical care gaps without adding to front office staff workload.
Assort Health leverages its growing dataset of over 150 million patient interactions, 62,000 complex care protocols and 1.6 million unique decision pathways from practices across 22 specialties.
"We own the entire communications layer for these practices, both inbound and outbound, and they're all connected to each other, so they leverage the same context and memory to create more seamless experiences across referrals and fax, payment collections, the care gap discovery, the patient intake," Jon Wang, founder and co-CEO of Assort Health told Fierce Healthcare in a first look at the new outbound AI capability.
Patient outreach is far more nuanced than automated reminders, Wang noted. "It's multi-step referral follow-ups, no-shows with specialty-specific scheduling constraints, care gaps that go unaddressed because no one has time to make the call. Practices know this work matters; they just can’t do it consistently," he said.
Assort Health was able to apply learnings from developing its inbound voice AI agents to build the outbound capability, said Jeffery Liu, founder and co-CEO of Assort Health.
"We're able to apply all the learnings we know about the patient preferences because we have this concept called patient journey memory, which is our ability to create a really personalized experience per patient based on all the interaction data, everything that we fed through the Assort Synapse Engine that enables us to outreach the patients at the proper time and through the proper modality," Liu said.
Assort Health's shared intelligence layer carries forward context, such as language preferences, timing and history, across every patient interaction.
"So the follow-up call knows what the first call said, and each touchpoint with a patient gets more informed and more personal over time. That's what makes this compounding rather than just automated," Liu said.
What started as inbound voice AI has evolved into a full AI agents platform spanning intake, scheduling, referrals, payments and ongoing patient engagement, all connected and learning from each interaction, Assort Health executives said.
These AI agents can save specialty practices significant amounts of time to automate what has typically been a highly manual task. Medical practices today are stretched thin. Inbound call volumes alone consume most of what front office teams have the capacity to handle.
At Boston Bone and Joint Institute, a six-location orthopedic care provider, medical staff used the outbound AI agent to quickly reschedule 53% of patient appointments after a snowstorm forced the organization to close its offices.
Katie Stoll, patient access and technology manager at Boston Bone and Joint Institute, called Assort Health's AI agents "game-changing" for the organization, which serves patients with 20 physicians and 21 advanced practice providers. "That's a huge time saver," she said.
Before using Assort's AI agents, the practice had six to eight people on the phones to contact patients and reschedule appointments in the event of a snowstorm or another unexpected event, like a recent electrical fire, Stoll said, and that required a lot of back and forth.
"What's great is that it's organized with the communication to the patient, not only from the patient side of things, being able to see why we're canceling an appointment, but then being able to just reschedule right then and there. So there's no back and forth," she said. "From the staff perspective, you have this list, and it's very transparent who's rescheduled, who didn't, and who we need to follow up with."
Stoll added, "We're able to help the patient get what they need faster. From the staff perspective, they are able to spend the time with the patients that are in front of them or the patient you have on the phone. Being able to utilize AI has really helped us be more present with the person in front of us, but then also having the patients get their answers faster and minimize the amount of time on hold."
"It's really saving [practices] a lot of time. Before, people used to literally have to make potentially hundreds, if not thousands, of these outbound outreaches a week," Liu said. "What's even more powerful is getting people to be better consumers of their healthcare and do things that they otherwise may not have, like making sure those referrals are actually converted, making sure that people come in for those flu shots or annual physicals when, otherwise, because they were reached out to at the wrong time and weren't able to convert, they're literally not going to get these kind of preventative healthcare appointments."
In early deployments of Assort Activate, primary care, orthopedics and ENT practices have seen high conversion rates. Annapolis Internal Medicine reported 61% of annual flu shot appointments were booked through agentic AI outreach, while SENTA Partners used proactive outreach campaigns to get 64% of its referral appointments scheduled, according to the company.
“Calling out to patients has always required staff to pick up the phone, sometimes multiple times, just to reach someone, and that's a lot of labor hours that can be used somewhere else," Titus Abraham, M.D., managing partner at Annapolis Internal Medicine, said in an Assort Health press release. "What's unique about Activate is that the patient can schedule within that same call. Previously, they'd have to call back or go into a different system entirely. Compared to prior seasons, we saw improved adherence to flu vaccination because of it.”
Twin Cities Orthopedics reported that use of Assort Activate increased outstanding patient collections, with 89% of patients paying outstanding balances, either as full or partial payments, and 47% of payments collected within the first seven days.
Voice AI in healthcare has become a competitive market and Assort Health has its sights set on being the "best AI-native patient access platform," Liu asserted.
"All of our products can talk to each other. So outside of concierge, our inbound product, Activate, our outbound products, we have referral processing, document processing, so end-to-end referral orchestration, document wrangling, we're doing patient intake, we're doing payments, we're doing two-way texting chatbots," he said. "Any tool that a provider or practice needs to interface with their patients, we'll cover. So it's the entire patient care navigation journey from their first contact and after they've gone to their appointment and up to collecting the patient responsibility and everything in between."
Assort Health raised a $76 million series B round in October, bringing its total funding to $102 million.
"We're basically positioned in the next two years to deploy $70 million in R&D and continue to be the dominant player, most ubiquitous player in the space, and provide the most value," Wang said. "We think the future will be that every patient will have their own personal AI care manager, essentially that Assort will be deploying. Similar to how we are building AI agents today for groups, we think over time, it makes sense that we'll be the platform to enable and empower these practices to be managing, testing and shipping their own AI agents, which is a really exciting new frontier for this technology."