Startup Assort Health has developed an outbound AI agent that can proactively reach out to patients, automate appointment rescheduling, close unresolved referrals, work on payment collection, and accelerate the uptake of flu vaccinations.
The AI agent, called Assort Activate, is already being used by more than 1,000 healthcare providers and can improve patient access without adding staff, executives said.
Assort Health will introduce specialty-specific agenttic AI voice agents in November 2023 to support practices ranging from orthopedics to cardiology to immunology, triaging incoming patient calls by answering frequently asked questions and routing patients to the right person within the clinic. Assort is built into providers’ electronic medical records and practice management software to schedule appointments and quickly resolve patient issues.
The company is currently expanding its agent platform across care, company 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 increasing the workload of front office staff.
Assort Health leverages a growing dataset of more than 150 million patient interactions, 62,000 complex treatment protocols, and 1.6 million unique decision paths from practices across 22 specialties.
“We own the entire communication layer for these practices, both inbound and outbound, and because they are all interconnected, we leverage the same context and memory to create a more seamless experience from referrals and faxes to payment collection, finding care gaps, and patient intake,” Assort Health founder and co-CEO Jon Wang told Fierce Healthcare in a first look at new outbound AI capabilities.
Patient outreach is much more subtle than automatic reminders, Wang noted. “Follow-up through multiple stages of referrals, no-shows due to specialty-specific schedule constraints, and gaps in care that go unaddressed because no one has time to make phone calls. Providers know this work is important, but they don’t do it consistently,” he said.
“Assort Health was able to apply what we learned from developing our inbound voice AI agent to building our outbound capabilities,” said Jeffery Liu, founder and co-CEO of Assort Health.
“We can apply all the learnings we know about patient preferences because we have a concept called patient journey memory, which is the ability to create a truly personalized experience for each patient based on all the interaction data, and all the data provided through the Assort Synapse Engine allows us to reach patients in the right way at the right time,” said Liu.
Assort Health’s shared intelligence layer transfers context such as language preference, timing, and history across every patient interaction.
“So in the follow-up call, you know what was said on the first call, and each touchpoint with the patient becomes more informed and more personal over time. That’s what makes this problem more complex than just automation,” Liu said.
What started as inbound voice AI has evolved into a complete AI agent platform spanning reception, scheduling, referrals, payments and ongoing patient engagement, all connected and learning from each interaction, Assorted Health executives said.
These AI agents can save significant amounts of specialized work to automate tasks that are typically highly manual. Today’s medical practice has reached its limits. The volume of inbound calls alone consumes most of the capacity a front office team can handle.
At Boston Bone and Joint Institute, which provides orthopedic care at six locations, medical staff used outbound AI agents to quickly reschedule 53% of patient appointments after a snowstorm closed offices.
Katie Stoll, patient access and technology manager at Boston Bone and Joint Institute, said Assorted Health’s AI agent is a “game changer” for the organization, which serves patients with 20 physicians and 21 advanced practice providers. “It’s a huge time saver,” she said.
Before using Assort’s AI agents, the clinic would have six to eight people contacting patients by phone and rescheduling appointments when unexpected events occurred, like a snowstorm or a recent electrical fire, which required a lot of interaction, Stoll said.
“What’s great is that the communication is organized, not just from the patient side, but to the patient, and you can reschedule on the fly while confirming the reason for canceling an appointment. So there’s no back-and-forth,” she said. “From a staff perspective, having this list makes it very clear who has changed their schedule, who hasn’t, and who they need to follow up with.”
Stoll added, “We can now help patients get what they need faster. From a staff perspective, they can spend their time with the patient in front of them or on the phone. Having AI available now allows us to be more in touch with the patient in front of us, but at the same time, we’re able to help patients get answers faster and minimize wait times.”
“This really saves us a lot of (practice) time. Previously, people would literally have to do hundreds, if not thousands, of outbound outreaches a week,” Liu said. “What’s even more powerful is getting people to be better consumers of health care and do things they wouldn’t otherwise do, like making sure referrals actually convert, making sure they show up for their flu shot or their annual checkup. Otherwise, you’re literally missing out on those kinds of preventive care appointments because you get contacted at the wrong time and you don’t convert.”
Initial implementations of Assort Activate have seen high conversion rates in primary care, orthopedics, and ENT practices. According to the companies, Annapolis Internal Medicine reported that 61% of its annual influenza vaccination appointments were booked through Agentic AI outreach, and SENTA Partners reported that it booked 64% of its referral appointments using proactive outreach campaigns.
“When calling patients, staff have always had to pick up the phone, sometimes multiple times, just to reach someone. That labor time could be used elsewhere,” Titus Abraham, M.D., managing partner of Annapolis Internal Medicine, said in a press release from Assorted Health. “What’s unique about Activate is that it allows patients to schedule within the same call. Previously, they would have to call back or switch to a completely different system. This has increased compliance rates for flu vaccinations compared to previous seasons.”
Twin Cities Orthopedics reported that using Assort Activate increased outstanding patient collections, with 89% of patients paying their outstanding balances 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 aims to become the “best AI-native patient access platform,” Liu claimed.
“All of our products can talk to each other, so beyond concierge, we do inbound products, outbound product activations, referral processing, document processing, end-to-end referral orchestration, document wrangling, patient intake, payments, chatbots for two-way text messaging,” he said. “We cover all the tools a provider or clinic needs to interact with a patient — the entire patient care navigation journey, from the initial contact, to the appointment, to collecting patient responsibilities and everything in between.”
Assort Health raised a $76 million Series B round in October, bringing its total funding to $102 million.
“We’ve basically put $70 million into research and development over the next two years and are positioned to continue to be the dominant player, the most ubiquitous player in this space and provide the most value,” Wang said. “We think that in the future, every patient will have a dedicated AI care manager, which is essentially what Assort is implementing. Just as we’re building AI agents for groups today, we think it makes sense that over time we’ll have a platform that allows these practices to manage, test, and ship their own AI agents. This is a really exciting new frontier for this technology.”
