Solution Erases Long Phone Holds for Patients, Supports Overwhelmed Medical Front Desk Workers and Improves Patient Access to Physicians
SAN FRANCISCO, CA / ACCESSWIRE / March 14, 2024 / 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.
Matt Humphrey, Partner at Quiet Capital led the funding round, joined by Four Acres, Tau Ventures, and a number of angel investors who are AI experts and healthcare founders themselves, including Aditya Khosla, founder and CTO, PathAI, and senior executives and founders from Flatiron Health, Presto AI, and Athena Health, among others.
Assort's generative AI model was trained on patient calls across hundreds of thousands of patient interactions. The platform creates a frictionless experience for patients calling to access care, while increasing efficiency for generally overwhelmed medical office call centers. According to McKinsey & Company's 2021 research, one quarter of the United States' healthcare costs are spent on healthcare administration, and tens of billions on patient services such as call centers.
Assort Health uses AI and NLP (natural language processing) to understand a caller's intent, then integrates with the medical providers' electronic health records (EHR) including Epic to resolve patient inquiries - with no human involvement needed.
"To our knowledge this is the first generative AI in healthcare call centers with proven results in a case study with patients. 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."
The Chicago Division of the Illinois Bone and Joint Institute, one of Assort Health's initial customers, was able to reduce call abandonment to a fraction of its previous level and cut hold times by more than half.
"We reduced our call center costs substantially while working with Assort Health's AI tech. This is a really big deal, especially when statistics show our patients are now better served," said Dr. David Garelick, Managing Partner, Illinois Bone and Joint Institute Chicago Division. "When I ask my more elderly patients if they noticed anything peculiar while scheduling, they didn't say they did. These patients had all been booked through Assort's voice AI. This is the best response I was expecting; booking an appointment should be like getting mail delivered. You don't notice when your packages arrive on time, you just expect it!"
"Over and over again, we hear how patients are extremely frustrated," said Assort Co-founder and CEO Jon Wang. "It is absurd and even dangerous for any patient with an urgent medical need to wait 20 minutes on hold (because the call center is overwhelmed) and finally be transferred to a medical assistant who can help."
Common tasks for Assort Health AI solution incorporate end-to-end voice automation of patient inbound calls:
- Complex (needing to determine which doctor to send the call to; new patient registration and appointment scheduling)
- Simple tasks such as established patient rescheduling, cancellations, and confirmations
- Triaging and routing calls to the appropriate department
- Answering frequently asked questions (such as address, visiting hours, and parking)
"It's a win-win for patient experiences of all kinds, and a huge relief for already overburdened staff. And those things together are a major benefit to the bottom line of health systems where dollars are already stretched thin," added Wang.
Assort Co-founder and CEO Wang is a former UCSF medical student with seven published articles about healthcare AI at Stanford. He was an executive and co-founder at successful behavioral and mental health platforms for over 600 employees before founding Assort Health.
Co-founder and CTO Liu has long had a strong interest in healthcare, from volunteering in a hospital as a young person, to his pre-med and engineering education at Duke. He was previously the head of product engineering at Athelas, where he worked on AI-related software for patient care and physician workflows for the $6.5 billion company.
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About Assort Health
Assort Health is the first generative AI built for healthcare call centers. The company is building the future of patient care navigation in healthcare. Assort Health's AI solution has been shown to reduce call drop rates by 2.7 times and cut average time on the phone by half. Assort Health has received $3.5 million in funding from Matt Humphrey, Partner at Quiet Capital, Four Acres, Tau Ventures, and a number of angel investors who are experts and healthcare founders themselves, including Aditya Khosla, Founder and CTO, PathAI, and senior executives from Flatiron Health, Presto AI, and Athena Health, among others.
For more information or to schedule a demo, visit assorthealth.com.
Media Contact:
Erica Zeidenberg
Hot Tomato Marketing
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SOURCE: Assort Health