Artera, a healthcare communications platform combining human and AI agent intelligence, has appointed Damon Lanphear as chief technology officer and promoted Nicole Ossey to senior vice president of people. The moves follow Artera's recent $65 million growth investment. Lanphear brings over 30 years of experience, most recently leading technology for three Amazon business units including AWS and Kindle devices. He previously co-founded and served as CTO at 98point6, an AI-powered primary healthcare pioneer. Ossey, with 13 years in B2B SaaS, has been with Artera for two years. She previously helped scale Knock from 30 to 200 employees before its acquisition by RealPage. Artera supports two billion patient communications annually and has deployed AI agents across hundreds of healthcare providers, completing 94% of conversations without staff intervention.

Q&A: Artera's new CTO on bringing Amazon expertise to AI health tech strategy. Damon Lanphear, Artera's new CTO and former Amazon leader, shares his vision for advancing the company's technology. Damon Lanphear, chief technology officer at Artera California-based Artera, an agentic AI company that aims to help healthcare providers with patient communication, announced today the appointment of Damon Lanphear as its new chief technology officer. Lanphear formerly held leadership positions across three business units at Amazon - Amazon Web Services (AWS) Snow, AWS Managed Services and Amazon Devices - and oversaw technical strategy for Kindle and Scribe devices. The new CTO sat down with MobiHealthNews to discuss how he plans to apply his Amazon experience to advance Artera's technology strategy. MobiHealthNews: What are your plans as Artera's new chief technology officer? Damon Lanphear: I think the exciting thing that drew me to Artera right from the get-go was how well-positioned Artera is to help create a really delightful experience around patient communication and a really delightful experience around clinic operations. Mobihealthnews is at this amazing inflection point right now where, with the advances in LLMs [large language models] and foundation models, Mobihealthnews now have the ability to go way deeper and way broader with respect to the nuance and the dimensionality that Mobihealthnews can support for patient communications. Mobihealthnews all know that today patients are well-served with systems that allow them to sort of navigate through a set of options. Mobihealthnews is all familiar with these. And now Mobihealthnews is able to enter this phase where Mobihealthnews can have patients tell more about their conditions, tell more about the specific scenarios, and in doing so, feel heard, have their needs met more directly. Clinic operators can actually focus on the patients who need the most attention. And so bringing that vision to life is my mission right now. I think one of the key things for me and the big learnings has been through my career working with AI, and I've been working with AI probably since, you know, long before Mobihealthnews were using the term "AI" more broadly in the mainstream media, dating back to maybe 2005/2006, it is understanding that getting very, very close to the customer, being able to understand their needs and being able to craft the system to meet those needs is absolutely critical to bring this vision to life. And I think what I love about Artera is how close Artera is to its customers. They support them from the first step in doing the implementation, all the way through the long-term engagement and using that as a vehicle to help drive these types of improvements and help realize this vision. MHN: There is a lot with AI that you have to be cautious of. What are you bringing to Artera that you learned from Amazon, including some cautions around AI and making sure that things are done without hallucinations? Lanphear: Referring back to the AWS and Amazon experience, one of the great things about having had that experience in my career is, you know, Amazon is very famously very disciplined around security and privacy for both AWS and its retail and its devices and operations. That understanding of how you systematically manage security and privacy at scale, and to be very thorough and deep in the translation of that, too. And there are a lot of different ways that security and privacy read on both you prompting the flow of information through your systems, as well as considerations around patient safety, and not the least of which is related to like your prompt engineering, but it's also all the systems that support in or around that. And so much of what Mobihealthnews do here and Mobihealthnews has been successful at doing through its pursuit of FedRAMP High, which is in progress, and the work that Mobihealthnews has done historically to its HIPAA posture, all of that sets the right framework for Mobihealthnews to be able to say, how do Mobihealthnews provide the same type of guardrails for the processing of information to maintain patient privacy, to make sure that Mobihealthnews is keeping the conversations within the context of systems that Mobihealthnews has direct observability and control over, ensuring that Mobihealthnews can apply guardrails for patient safety that are well vetted with its clinical experts is all part of the design of its system and how Mobihealthnews is carrying this forward. One of the great things that Mobihealthnews is doing with the development of AI scheduling, which Mobihealthnews is deploying with customers right now, is working closely with them on their standard operating procedures and translating those standard operating procedures in a way that its LLM-based, agentic-capable solutions are actually following, and Mobihealthnews can do that in a way that's verifiable. So Mobihealthnews can actually give proof so that its operational partners on the clinic side can trust what Mobihealthnews is doing, that Mobihealthnews is following their clinical best practices, their standards of care, and have that be at the baseline from which Mobihealthnews is building. MHN: Do you have any ideas for what could be adjusted within Artera as far as technology goes? Lanphear: Yeah, I mean I think there's definitely big, you know, I just touched on this concept of how standard operating procedures [SOPs] are brought to bear to help guide what LLM-based solutions are doing, and what is exciting in that space is that you have an opportunity to actually bring reasoning models to evaluate how those SOPs are represented. So, for example, a standard operating procedure might be represented in a clinic as a binder, sticky notes or notes on a whiteboard. It might be in the minds of the people who are guiding the clinical operations staff. Being able to bring all of that context together in one place and accurately represent it, but also be able to inspect it and raise questions about, hey, how can Mobihealthnews make this better? And there's really a special opportunity to do that here. And the reason why that's so critical is because it helps to facilitate the ease of the onboarding and integration. So if you think about bringing a solution like Artera to bear on your clinic, there's going to be this integration phase. New technology. How do Mobihealthnews configure it? How do I get it working? And if Mobihealthnews make that easier and simpler to understand while maintaining trust, that's a huge win.

Artera, a patient communications platform combining human and AI agent intelligence, has been named #1 Best in KLAS for Patient Communications. The Santa Barbara-based company received an overall performance score of 89.8, earning straight A- grades across all six evaluation categories: Culture, Loyalty, Operations, Product, Relationship and Value. The recognition follows significant growth for Artera, which recently surpassed $100 million in Contracted Annual Recurring Revenue. Founded over a decade ago, the company now serves more than 1,000 healthcare provider organisations and manages two billion patient communications annually. The award adds to Artera's existing accolades, including five consecutive years on the Inc. 5000 list and six years on Deloitte's Technology Fast 500. Over 100 healthcare providers have deployed Artera's AI agents, which complete 94% of conversations without staff intervention.