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Assort Health and Nextech announced a partnership to codevelop an integrated AI agent offering for ophthalmology practices. The collaboration builds on Assort's proprietary Nextech integration and experience across hundreds of healthcare deployments, including 40% of Fortune 20 healthcare enterprises. Assort's AI agents handle complex patient access workflows in ophthalmology, managing subspecialty routing, testing requirements, insurance verification, and clinical escalation rules. At DuPage Ophthalmology, a Nextech practice, Assort supports roughly 500 patient calls weekly, saving more than 60% of call time. The partnership will deepen integration with a shared API roadmap, enabling additional workflows beyond current capabilities including patient information, scheduling, and rescheduling. Nextech, named 2026 Best in KLAS winner for Ambulatory Ophthalmology Solutions, has served specialty practices for over 25 years. Assort's platform now supports inbound and outbound scheduling, patient intake, referrals, after-hours coverage, and medication requests across healthcare organisations.

Parakeet Health builds the patient access operating layer. Parakeet Health is building a healthcare-native conversational AI platform for patient access. Founded in San Francisco in 2023, the company is led by co-founders Jung Park, Aaron Lee, and Eric Mao, who serve as CEO, CTO, and CPO. The platform handles the administrative tripwires between patient demand and delivered care: calls that go unanswered, referrals that stall, cancellations that leave revenue on the table, and follow-ups that never happen. Parakeet operates across voice, SMS, fax, and email, integrating with electronic health record and scheduling systems instead of living beside them as another lonely dashboard. That distinction matters now. Healthcare AI spent its first act proving that software could hold a conversation. The next act is harder and more valuable: proving it can finish the work. About Parakeet Health. Parakeet Health describes itself as a healthcare-native, AI-native conversational platform for end-to-end patient access. Its autonomous agents book, reschedule, and cancel appointments; manage referrals; backfill cancellations; re-engage no-shows; run patient-recall campaigns; and answer operational questions around insurance, preparation, locations, and policies. The product is designed for medical groups whose complexity has outrun the front desk. A patient interaction may touch a phone system, fax queue, scheduling database, electronic health record, provider-specific rules, and a centralized call center before an appointment is booked. Every handoff is an opportunity for delay, leakage, or an exhausted employee to inherit somebody else's mess. Parakeet's wager is that provider organizations no longer want a point solution for each leak. They want one system accountable for the outcome. The patient-access problem is operational. Patient access sounds like a customer-service category until an unfilled appointment becomes lost revenue. Then the language changes quickly. Missed calls, incomplete referrals, last-minute cancellations, and overdue recalls create the same basic failure: care demand exists, but the operating system cannot convert it into a completed appointment. Parakeet's platform monitors and acts across those moments, using practice-level rules and integrations with systems such as Epic, Cerner, athenahealth, eClinicalWorks, ModMed, and Nextech. In a company-published outbound case study, Parakeet reported a 39% cancellation-fill rate and 14% conversion across outbound campaigns for a specialty practice with more than 150 locations. The figures are not an independent market benchmark, but they illustrate the economic target: fewer empty slots, less manual chasing, and more capacity converted into care. This is also why the company's pay-for-performance model is strategically interesting. Parakeet says customers pay for booked appointments, resolved interactions, and call-center time saved. The model forces the pitch away from software seats and toward outcomes. Healthcare has bought enough technology that creates activity reports while employees keep doing the actual work. Leadership built around healthcare and AI. Jung Park, Parakeet's co-founder and CEO, brings more than 25 years of healthcare operating experience, including leadership roles at One Medical, Epocrates, and California Skin Institute. Co-founder and CTO Aaron Lee leads the technical organization, while co-founder and CPO Eric Mao leads product. That mix matters because patient access is not a clean software problem. Scheduling rules vary by specialty, physician, location, insurance, procedure, and urgency. A generic voice layer can sound polished and still create operational chaos downstream. Parakeet's advantage, if it compounds, will come from understanding those rules well enough to turn conversation into completed workflow. The founders are effectively selling two kinds of trust at once. Patients need an interaction that feels patient and competent. Provider organizations need predictable integration, escalation, compliance, and financial results. A system that wins only one side does not win the account. Enterprise adoption is the proof point. Parakeet's October 2026 Series A announcement put numbers around its commercial momentum. The company reported 10x annual recurring revenue growth over the prior year, deployments serving more than 2,800 providers across more than 1,100 locations, and customers among six of the ten largest U.S. dermatology groups. The company has named organizations including QualDerm Partners, Schweiger Dermatology Group, Aegis Medical Group, Genome Medical, and Pacific Coast Dermatology & Wellness Center. In September 2026, Parakeet announced a partnership with QualDerm, which supports nearly 160 practices across 17 states. The deployment focuses on finding unused appointment capacity and reconnecting patients after cancellations, missed visits, and overdue follow-ups. Parakeet has raised $13 million in disclosed funding. Its $10 million Series A was led by Canvas Ventures, with participation from Blank Space Ventures, StoryHouse Ventures, and HMC INQ, following a $3 million seed round announced in 2024. The capital gives Parakeet more room to expand its technology, team, personalization capabilities, enterprise deployments, and reach into additional specialties. It also raises the standard of proof. Enterprise healthcare customers do not grade on conversational charm. They grade on access, utilization, cost, revenue, and whether the system survives real-world scheduling logic. Hiring reveals the next operating chapter. Parakeet's careers page currently lists roles for a senior software engineer, forward deployed engineer, senior customer success manager, and founding technical recruiter, all in San Francisco. That combination is more revealing than a generic promise to grow the team. Core engineering supports platform depth. Forward-deployed engineering addresses the unglamorous but decisive work of making enterprise systems function inside customer environments. Customer success connects deployment to measurable outcomes. Recruiting capacity suggests the company expects the hiring problem itself to become an operating constraint. Parakeet lists High Agency, No Ego, Craftsmanship, and Stay Curious as its values. The useful test will be whether those ideas survive enterprise scaling, when customization requests multiply and every customer believes its scheduling rules are a sacred text discovered on a mountain. What Parakeet Health signals for Healthcare AI. The healthcare AI market is moving from assistants to accountable operating systems. Transcription proved that clinicians would adopt focused AI tools. Patient access may prove whether health systems will let AI own a longer, messier chain of work across channels, departments, and financial outcomes. Parakeet Health matters because it is choosing that harder battlefield. The company is not asking healthcare organizations to admire a clever agent. It is asking them to hand over a measurable operational function and judge the software by what gets booked, recovered, and resolved. That is where the market is heading. The winning healthcare AI companies will not be the ones that produce the most fluent demo. They will be the ones that make the invisible machinery of care work better when nobody is watching. DevCuration Data Healthcare AI funding, last 30 days. DevCuration's funding database tracked 18 Healthcare AI rounds totaling $735.2M in disclosed capital over the past 30 days. 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How to reduce dropped calls with nextech VoIP integration. Posted by Tuba Bashte | Last updated: July 22, 2026 Table of contents. Introduction. Dropped calls cost specialty practices more than a frustrated patient on the other end. Missed prescription requests, rescheduled procedures, and lost consultation inquiries all trace back to unreliable phone infrastructure. If your practice runs on Nextech and still deals with dropped or garbled calls, the fix is usually in how the connected VoIP system is set up, not Nextech itself. AI summary. * Dropped calls in medical offices are typically caused by network bandwidth issues, outdated hardware, or overloaded call routing, not the EHR. * Cloud-based VoIP reduces dropped calls by removing dependency on legacy PBX hardware and enabling redundant, distributed call routing. * A stable VoIP setup for a Nextech practice needs adequate bandwidth, quality of service (QoS) configuration, and a provider with healthcare-grade uptime. * Call routing tied to real appointment and provider data (via integration) prevents the call queue overload that often causes drops during peak hours. * Practices should test call quality under real patient-volume conditions before fully switching phone systems. Why do calls drop in medical offices? Dropped calls are almost always a network or infrastructure issue, not a software issue inside Nextech. Common causes include: How does VoIP reduce dropped calls? Cloud-based VoIP addresses most of these causes directly: No dependency on aging on-site hardware. Calls route through the cloud rather than a physical PBX box that can fail. Distributed infrastructure. Reputable VoIP providers run redundant servers, so a single point of failure doesn't take down your phone lines. Scalable capacity. Call volume spikes (like after a marketing push or a weather closure) don't overwhelm a fixed number of physical lines. Built-in call analytics. Practices can see where drops are occurring, whether at the network level or during specific call flows, and fix the actual bottleneck. Checklist: reducing dropped calls on a nextech-integrated VoIP system. * Confirm your internet connection has enough dedicated bandwidth for expected call volume (VoIP providers can estimate this based on staff count). * Set up Quality of Service (QoS) on your router to prioritize voice traffic. * Use wired connections for front-desk phones handling high call volumes where possible. * Choose a VoIP provider with published uptime guarantees, ideally 99.9% or higher. * Set up call routing rules based on real scheduling and provider data instead of a single shared line. * Monitor call quality reports monthly, not just when patients complain. What to Look for in a VoIP Provider for a Nextech Practice. How a Nextech VoIP integration improves patient communication. While Nextech manages scheduling and patient records, integrating it with a HIPAA-compliant VoIP solution helps practices create a more connected communication workflow. Here's how a Nextech integration with Emitrr supports day-to-day operations. AI Voice Agent for 24/7 call handling. Emitrr's AI Voice Agent can answer routine patient questions, capture after-hours inquiries, and help patients schedule or reschedule appointments, ensuring calls are addressed even when staff are unavailable. Intelligent call routing. Instead of routing every caller through a single queue, Emitrr directs calls to the appropriate department, provider, or location based on configurable routing rules. This helps reduce wait times and prevents call bottlenecks during busy periods. Missed call text back. If a patient can't reach the practice, Emitrr automatically sends a text message so the conversation can continue over SMS. This helps reduce abandoned calls and gives patients another way to connect without waiting on hold. Unified voice and text communication. With voice calls and text conversations managed from a single platform, staff can respond to patients more efficiently without switching between multiple communication tools. Designed to work alongside Nextech. Emitrr integrates with Nextech to support patient communication workflows while allowing Nextech to remain the system of record. Practices can improve phone operations without disrupting their existing clinical or practice management processes. Watch this quick video to see how it works. Key takeaways. * Dropped calls are almost always a network or infrastructure problem, not something caused by Nextech itself. * Cloud VoIP reduces drops through redundant infrastructure, scalable capacity, and better call routing than legacy on-premise systems. * Bandwidth, QoS configuration, and wired connections matter as much as the VoIP provider you choose. * A VoIP system that pulls context from Nextech's scheduling data can route calls more intelligently and prevent queue overload. * Regularly reviewing call quality reports helps catch problems before they affect patient experience. Frequently asked questions. Why do calls drop even after switching to VoIP? Usually due to insufficient bandwidth, lack of QoS configuration, or relying on Wi-Fi instead of wired connections for high-volume phone lines. VoIP quality depends heavily on network setup, not just the provider. Is Nextech responsible for dropped calls? No. Nextech does not include native phone functionality, so call quality depends entirely on the separate VoIP or phone system connected to the practice, and how well that systemu0026#039;s network is configured. How much bandwidth does a medical office need for VoIP? This varies by call volume and number of concurrent lines, but VoIP providers typically calculate bandwidth needs per active call, plus overhead for existing systems like Nextech and imaging uploads on the same network. Can VoIP integration with Nextech reduce dropped calls specifically? Indirectly, yes. When call routing uses real scheduling and provider data from Nextech, calls are less likely to pile into a single overloaded line, which is a common cause of drops during peak hours. What uptime should a VoIP provider guarantee for a medical practice? Look for providers publishing 99.9% uptime or higher, along with redundant infrastructure, since even small amounts of downtime can mean missed patient calls during business hours. Conclusion. For Nextech practices, maintaining high-quality phone communication requires more than simply choosing a VoIP provider. The right combination of network configuration, reliable infrastructure, and a well-integrated phone system helps practices deliver better patient experiences while reducing the operational challenges caused by poor call quality and missed conversations.