Tennr has appointed Dr Toby Cosgrove, former president and CEO of Cleveland Clinic, and Cindy Hundorfean, former president and CEO of Allegheny Health Network, as industry advisors. The pair will work with Tennr's product and clinical teams as the company expands its services to large integrated delivery networks. Over 400,000 providers nationwide use Tennr to manage patient intake through treatment. The platform helps providers identify documentation gaps before intake and maintain care continuity. Cosgrove led Cleveland Clinic for 13 years, growing it into an $8 billion health system serving nearly 8 million patients annually. Hundorfean drove an $85 million financial turnaround at Allegheny Health Network in under two years and directed over $2 billion in capital investment, opening five hospitals and six cancer centres.

Assort Health signals the next wave of voice AI in healthcare. Artificial intelligence is becoming an increasingly familiar part of healthcare, but much of the attention has focused on clinical decision support and medical documentation. A newer category of AI is gaining momentum behind the scenes: voice agents that handle patient communication and administrative workflows. That trend accelerated this month as Assort Health announced a $120 million Series C funding round, bringing the company's total funding to $222 million. Led by Menlo Ventures with participation from Lightspeed Venture Partners, GV, Quiet Capital, First Round Capital, Chemistry, Tao Ventures, and others, the investment reflects growing confidence that AI voice platforms may become foundational infrastructure for healthcare organizations. Beyond scheduling. Assort Health launched in 2023 with a focus on helping specialty practices manage patient phone calls. Since then, the platform has expanded far beyond appointment scheduling. Today, its AI agents support patient intake, referrals, insurance eligibility, document processing, laboratory requests, prescription refills, payments, and follow-up communications. Rather than handling a single task, the platform is designed to support patients throughout their entire care journey while reducing repetitive administrative work for healthcare staff. The company says its proprietary AI model, Synapse, was developed specifically for specialty care. According to Assort Health, Synapse learns from each deployment by generating edge cases, testing workflows, and continuously improving as it processes new patient interactions. That specialty focus is supported by a substantial proprietary dataset built from approximately 190 million patient interactions, 62,000 specialty care protocols, and 1.6 million clinical pathways. Instead of relying solely on general-purpose large language models, Assort Health is building AI around the unique workflows that distinguish specialties like dermatology, orthopedics, cardiology, and immunology. Dermatology is already seeing results. Among the practices using the platform is MDCS Dermatology, a multi-location dermatology group serving patients throughout New York and New Jersey. The practice initially adopted Assort Health's AI for inbound scheduling and call triage before expanding into additional outbound patient communication workflows. According to practice leadership, the platform connects scheduling, referrals, intake, insurance eligibility, payments, and other operational processes into a unified system instead of treating each as separate administrative tasks. MDCS reports a 20% increase in appointment bookings since implementation while maintaining a 4.9-star rating across more than 30,000 online reviews. The practice also says the increased efficiency has supported continued provider growth without sacrificing the patient experience. As dermatology practices continue balancing growing patient demand with staffing challenges, AI-powered administrative tools may become increasingly valuable for improving access while allowing clinical teams to focus on patient care. A growing race for healthcare AI. Assort Health's funding comes as investment in healthcare AI agents continues to accelerate. Companies including Artera, UnityAI, EliseAI, Hello Patient, Tennr, and Prosper AI are all developing AI systems designed to automate patient communications and administrative operations. While many platforms offer similar capabilities, companies are increasingly competing on proprietary healthcare data, specialty-specific expertise, and real-world implementation experience rather than simply offering conversational AI. For Assort Health, that competitive advantage may come from the scale of its deployments. The company reports 20-fold revenue growth over the past 15 months, driven by adoption across specialty practices and expanding partnerships with healthcare systems ranging from community organizations to academic medical centers. Looking ahead. Voice AI is quickly evolving beyond virtual receptionists into intelligent administrative platforms capable of managing much of the patient journey before a physician ever enters the exam room. For practices, that could mean fewer missed calls, shorter scheduling delays, and more efficient front-office operations. For patients, it may translate into faster access to care, more personalized communication, and fewer administrative barriers. As healthcare organizations continue investing in AI, the companies that combine specialty-specific knowledge with large proprietary datasets and proven clinical workflows may be best positioned to shape the next generation of patient access technology.

How TailorMed, Tennr aim to speed specialty access. TailorMed and Tennr are integrating referral automation with medication affordability tools for infusion centers and specialty pharmacies, aiming to address patient barriers earlier. TailorMed and Tennr announced a partnership integrating their platforms to connect referral automation with medication access and affordability support, a move the companies say is designed to help infusion centers and specialty pharmacies identify care barriers earlier and start patients on treatment faster.[1] The collaboration pairs Tennr's referral intake, documentation review and access workflow automation with TailorMed's affordability and ongoing-support tools.[1] The companies will begin with an integration, with Pure Infusion as the first customer, that they say will create a more connected access infrastructure so teams can identify care barriers earlier and move patients toward treatment faster. The tie-up reflects a broader movement in pharmacy care toward that supports care teams and patients across traditionally fragmented access, intake, affordability and adherence workflows. What problem is the integration trying to solve? The companies frame the gap between a referral and the start of therapy as a primary point where patients stall, often over cost uncertainty. "Our work has always been about getting patients care faster," said Trey Holterman, CEO of Tennr, in the announcement.[1] "The biggest reason we see patients not getting access to medication is fear and uncertainty around what the medication will cost them personally and what resources they have at their disposal to cover those costs." Srulik Dvorsky, CEO of TailorMed, positioned the integration as joining two halves of the same workflow. "Getting a patient referred and empowering them to succeed in their medication journey are two halves of the same problem," he said. "Tennr has built remarkable technology for the first half and we've built a vast network and robust solution set for the second. Bringing the pieces together means fewer patients falling in the gap between a referral and the start of care." Pure Infusion said the arrangement is meant to reduce friction in moving patients into treatment. "Our patients need to access care quickly, barrier-free," added Brady Porter, chief commercial officer, at Pure Infusion.[1] How large is the access-and-affordability gap? Industry data point to significant patient drop-off between prescription and treatment, particularly for high-cost therapies. Nearly two-thirds of prescriptions for newly launched drugs go unfilled in the first year on the market, according to IQVIA's US Medicine Use Trends 2026 report.[2] Across 99 novel medicines launched from 2020 to 2024, an average of 35% of first-year prescriptions were filled while 65% went unfilled, including 49% rejected by payers and 17% abandoned by patients after approval, likely because of high out-of-pocket costs. Both failure points are what the TailorMed-Tennr integration is aimed at, pairing referral and documentation automation that can reduce payer rejections with affordability support for patients who clear approval but stall at the point of cost. Why does this matter for the access channel? The integration is the latest sign of consolidation among the technology layers that sit between a prescription and the pharmacy, as referral, intake, affordability and adherence functions increasingly move onto shared infrastructure rather than operating as separate point solutions. It also follows a similar move by TailorMed weeks earlier. In June, the company announced a partnership with WeInfuse, a software platform for infusion providers and, to embed its medication access network directly into WeInfuse workflows.[3] Two access-infrastructure agreements targeting the infusion and specialty setting inside a two-week span underscore how quickly affordability tooling is being wired into upstream referral and intake systems.