What You Should Know:
- Assort Health is introducing the first generative AI solution built specifically for healthcare call centers, promising to erase that dreaded hold music forever.
- The company is announcing $3.5 million in funding, which will be used to continue scaling the team to meet rapidly accelerating demand with large healthcare organizations.
Revolutionizing Healthcare Communication: Assort Health’s AI-Powered Patient Call Automation
Matt Humphrey, Partner at Quiet Capital, spearheaded the funding round, accompanied by Four Acres, Tau Ventures, and a cadre of angel investors who boast expertise in AI and healthcare, including luminaries like Aditya Khosla, the founder and CTO of PathAI, as well as senior executives and founders from esteemed entities like Flatiron Health, Presto AI, and Athena Health, among others.
Assort’s revolutionary AI model underwent training on patient calls spanning hundreds of thousands of interactions. The platform streamlines the patient calling experience, simultaneously enhancing efficiency for busy medical office call centers. According to McKinsey & Company’s 2021 research, a substantial portion of the United States’ healthcare expenditure, approximately one quarter, is allocated to healthcare administration, with tens of billions spent on patient services, notably call centers.
Leveraging AI and NLP (natural language processing), Assort Health adeptly discerns caller intent, seamlessly integrating with medical providers’ electronic health records (EHR), including Epic, to address patient inquiries autonomously. Notably, the Chicago Division of the Illinois Bone and Joint Institute, an early adopter of Assort Health, witnessed significant reductions in call abandonment rates and hold times, thereby underscoring the platform’s efficacy.
Assort Health’s AI solution handles a spectrum of patient inbound call tasks, ranging from intricate determinations such as directing calls to the appropriate physician and facilitating new patient registrations and appointment scheduling, to more straightforward responsibilities like managing rescheduling, cancellations, and confirmations for established patients. Additionally, the platform adeptly triages calls and dispenses answers to frequently posed inquiries, such as location details, visiting hours, and parking information.
Wang, Co-founder and CEO of Assort, brings to the table a wealth of experience, having been a former UCSF medical student with seven published articles on healthcare AI from Stanford. Before founding Assort Health, he served as an executive and co-founder at successful behavioral and mental health platforms, overseeing a team of over 600 employees. Meanwhile, Co-founder and CTO Liu, with a robust background in healthcare stemming from early volunteer work in hospitals to his educational pursuits in pre-med and engineering at Duke, previously served as the head of product engineering at Athelas, where he contributed to AI-driven software solutions for patient care and physician workflows at the esteemed $6.5 billion company.
“What we’re doing will become the norm in 5 years and we will lead that charge,” said Jeff Liu, co-founder and CTO, Assort Health. “Our platform is powered by the same underlying framework that drives ChatGPT’s voice-to-voice functionalities. We’re using the most advanced LLMs, TTS (text to speech) and STT (speech to text) models that have just become available in the past few months to ensure an optimized patient experience.”
