What You Should Know:
– Ascertain, a healthcare technology company focused on empowering care teams with artificial intelligence (AI) raises $10M in Series A funding round led by Deerfield Management, featuring strategic participation from Northwell Health.
– The investment will be used to accelerate Ascertain’s growth trajectory and expand access to its innovative AI-powered solutions across the healthcare ecosystem.
– The company aims to enable higher quality patient care, accelerate care journeys, and foster more cost-efficient care delivery for health systems, payers, and independent provider groups.
Addressing Case Managers Administrative Burden
Ascertain addresses a critical pain point in healthcare: the immense administrative burden placed on case managers. Studies indicate these vital professionals can spend up to 60% of their time on manual administrative tasks like documentation, securing prior authorizations, and ensuring compliance. This leaves less time for high-impact activities such as direct patient care planning and managing high-risk individuals. Compounding this issue is an acute labor shortage, with over 100,000 open positions for case managers and related administrative roles currently unfilled in the US, making it difficult for health systems to meet patient needs effectively.
Ascertain’s AI-powered case management platform directly tackles these challenges by automating time-consuming workflows. This automation boosts efficiency and empowers often understaffed case management teams to operate more effectively, focusing their expertise where it matters most – on the patient.
Pilot with Northwell Health
The company has already demonstrated promising results through a pilot program with Northwell Health’s centralized transitions-of-care administration team, successfully processing authorizations and showcasing the platform’s ability to free up nurses, case managers, social workers, and other staff for patient-centric tasks. Northwell Health is also a member of the Aegis Digital Consortium, a collaborative effort among 11 leading health systems aimed at developing and scaling AI-enabled technology solutions, like Ascertain, to address healthcare’s most pressing quality, cost, and equity challenges.
Ascertain Leadership
Leading Ascertain is CEO Mark Michalski, M.D., who brings extensive experience from the intersection of healthcare and technology, having held roles at Mass General Brigham, Amazon, Butterfly Network, and Hyperfine Research. Under his leadership, Ascertain has developed a flexible, easily deployable agentic AI solution designed to integrate seamlessly into existing healthcare systems and workflows. As the company scales, Dr. Michalski will continue as Ascertain’s CEO while also taking on the role of Chief Information Officer at Deerfield Management. In a related move, Ascertain will relocate its operations to Cure, Deerfield’s health innovation campus in New York City.
“There’s a critical need to develop and implement AI solutions to improve operational efficiencies, ease the administrative burden on payers and providers, and facilitate information sharing,” said Michalski. “Collaborating with Deerfield, Northwell, and Aegis provides Ascertain access to a range of distribution channels, workflows, and data, which we believe will unlock new levels of efficiency for healthcare workers.”
