Principal Agent Strategist

Assort Health has launched Referrals, an AI agent that automates the processing and management of medical referrals for specialty practices and health systems. The platform processes inbound referrals, confirms patient eligibility, and matches patients to appropriate providers, identifying a better-fit provider in 50% of cases. The AI agent reaches out to patients via voice, text, or email, and books appointments directly into electronic health records. Assort reports a 79% conversion rate of referrals into scheduled appointments. The system processes referrals that previously sat untouched for days within an hour of arrival. The launch follows Assort Health's $120 million Series C funding round. The company says its platform is built on more than 225 million specialty patient interactions and integrates with leading EHR systems including Epic and athenahealth.

Assort Health names Dr. Sunny Eappen Chief Medical Officer. Submitted by tim on Tue, 08/11/2026 - 04:55 Related Company Former Physician and UVMHN CEO Joins Assort to Help Health Systems Expand Patient Access, Make Better Use of Clinical Capacity, and Deploy AI at Enterprise Scale Vermont Business Magazine Assort Health, the leading AI agents platform for the entire patient journey, today named Sunny Eappen, MD, MBA, as its first Chief Medical Officer, bringing decades of clinical leadership to guide the development of AI agents that safely navigate complex patient needs and care pathways. Health systems face growing demand for care, yet access is constrained by staffing and fragmented administrative processes. Patients and staff navigate scheduling, referrals, care gap closure, and other administrative work that prevent patients from progressing in their care journey despite latent capacity. As Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Eappen will help Assort address these barriers by bringing clinical and operational expertise to the company's work with large healthcare organizations. Dr. Eappen brings more than three decades of experience across clinical care, hospital operations, and health system leadership, from practicing anesthesiology to serving as a hospital chief medical officer and, most recently, President and CEO of a multi-state rural health network. In his new role, he will help guide how Assort builds and deploys AI for large health systems, with a focus on expanding access, making better use of limited clinical capacity, and ensuring the platform reflects the realities of how health systems operate. "Nearly every health system is trying to solve the same fundamental problem: how to connect patients to the right provider without unnecessary friction. I've spent much of my career trying to solve this problem from inside health systems," said Dr. Sunny Eappen. "We have more patients who need care than our workforce can serve, which means we must use the current breakthroughs in AI to solve these problems right now. I joined Assort because its platform can learn across organizations and specialties in a way no individual health system can replicate on its own. Assort creates an extraordinary opportunity to expand access by overcoming the obstacles that patients, staff, and clinicians currently face in connecting patients and their caregivers." "Dr. Eappen has spent his career leading the kinds of organizations we're building for," said Jon Wang, Founder and Co-CEO of Assort Health. "He's experienced firsthand the operational complexity behind every patient interaction, from scheduling and referrals to capacity planning and care delivery. He knows AI only matters if it helps health systems see more patients without creating more work for the people delivering care. His clinical judgment and operating experience will shape how we build." Assort's platform coordinates patient-facing workflows across scheduling, referrals, care gap closure, document processing, medication refills, payments, and more. Underlying the platform are more than 62,000 care protocols, 1.6 million decision pathways, and 200 million specialty patient interactions that capture the complexity of provider preferences, subspecialty routing rules, payer billing requirements, and other operational logic that govern patient access. These protocols are automatically built and continuously refined through Assort's Synapse engine, then tailored by Assort's implementation team to each organization's workflows, accelerating deployment while incorporating operational best practices learned across hundreds of deployments. "The hardest part of building AI for health systems is not automating a task. It's understanding how decisions made in one part of the organization affect whether a patient reaches the right clinician and whether that clinician's time is used well," said Jeffery Liu, Founder and Co-CEO of Assort Health. "Dr. Eappen brings that whole-system perspective in-house because he's had to navigate tradeoffs across an entire health system. He'll help us evaluate critical clinical workflows and care protocols so that we can build around the realities of delivering care, rather than asking health systems to reorganize around AI, while enabling Assort to tackle more clinically sophisticated challenges over time." Dr. Eappen most recently served as President and CEO of University of Vermont Health, a six-hospital rural academic health system with roughly 14,000 employees serving one million patients across Vermont and northern New York. In this role, he oversaw operations for the system's academic medical center, two community hospitals, three critical access hospitals, a children's hospital, and home health and hospice services. Previously, Dr. Eappen served as Chief Medical Officer and Senior Vice President of Medical Affairs at Brigham and Women's Hospital and as Chief Medical Officer and Chair of Anesthesiology at Massachusetts Eye and Ear. He completed his anesthesiology residency at Brigham and Women's Hospital, his MD at the University of Chicago, and his MBA at Yale. He is a special advisor in Anesthesiology at Mass General Brigham and remains a Clinical Professor of Anesthesiology at the University of Vermont's Larner College of Medicine. Expanding Assort's Health System Leadership Dr. Eappen's appointment continues Assort's investment in building the leadership team and expertise required to support health systems adopting AI across the patient journey. Imaad Rashied, Vice President of Health Systems, leads Assort's health systems business and brings more than 15 years of experience building and scaling health system operations businesses, including leading AI product commercialization at Qventus and holding leadership positions at Clockwise.MD and BluCheck Healthcare. Together with Dr. Eappen, he works closely with health system executives to identify where AI can expand access, improve clinical capacity, and support sustainable operational change. Assort has also expanded its health systems team to include Area Vice Presidents Mitch Anderson, Michael Gaines, Alex Huber, Randy Kosmalski, and Jake Puckett. Together, these leaders bring six decades of experience working with specialty groups and large health systems to adopt technology, build lasting partnerships, and achieve measurable results. In addition to new members of the health systems team, Assort Health welcomes Marie D'Aiuto as Patient Access Consultant. D'Aiuto brings years of experience supporting orthopedic patients and helping healthcare organizations transform patient access. About Assort Health Assort Health is the most widely used AI agents platform for the patient journey, from scheduling and intake to referrals, forms, document processing, medication refills, and payments. It is built on more than 210 million specialty patient interactions and a model that updates in real time to handle the complexity of healthcare that general-purpose AI can't. That foundation now powers patient access across multi-site practices, multi-specialty groups, and health systems. Customers see results like a 5% lift in appointment volume, a 115% increase in labor capacity, up to $4.3 million per 100 providers in new revenue capture, 97% resolution rates, and 79% of referrals scheduled without staff intervention. The platform integrates natively with leading EHR and practice management systems, including Epic and athenahealth, enabling deployment without disrupting existing clinical workflows. Provider groups and health systems turn to Assort when the complexity outgrows their existing tools. To support vital journalism, access its archives and get unique features like its award-winning profiles, Book of Lists & Business-to-Business Directory, subscribe HERE! Vermont Business Magazine

Assort Health lands $120M to scale patient journey AI agents. The Series C, led by Menlo Ventures, pushed Assort to a $1.2 billion valuation and will support its expansion from voice AI into broader health system operations. By Eve Bender | June 25, 2026 | 11:40 AM Assort Health Co-Founders and Co-CEOs Jon Wang (L) and Jeffery Liu Photo: Assort Health Assort Health, a company offering AI agents for patient access and engagement, announced a $120 million Series C funding round led by Menlo Ventures at a valuation of $1.2 billion. The raise brings Assort's total funding to more than $222 million, according to the company's announcement. The financing moves the company into unicorn status and will help it expand from a voice AI patient access platform into an "agentic operating system" for the patient journey. Investors participating in the round included Lightspeed Venture Partners, Felicis, First Round Capital, Chemistry, Joe Montana, Tau Ventures and Quiet Capital. JP Sanday, partner at Menlo Ventures, will join Assort's board, and Matt Murphy, also a partner at Menlo Ventures, will serve as a board observer. Assort also announced its expansion into health system operations, including large community-based organizations and academic medical centers. John Muir Health is among the health systems partnering with the company for ambulatory operations, according to the announcement. WHAT IT DOES Assort offers AI agents that handle patient-facing and operational workflows across voice, text and web. The company touts that its platform is built on more than 190 million patient interactions and supports scheduling, intake forms, referrals, document processing, medication refills, real-time eligibility, lab requests and payments. Its platform now includes four products: Concierge, which handles inbound calls, triage, lab requests, medication refills, scheduling, insurance eligibility and intake; Activate, which conducts patient outreach to close referral loops, address care gaps, recover no-shows and resolve payments; Orchestrate, which runs operational work behind each visit and writes information back to the EHR; and Empower, an AI copilot for staff managing complex patient access needs. The products are connected by Patient Journey Memory, which the company describes as patient context that creates a continuous record across interactions. "Specialty care is a different discipline than most AI vendors realize, and that difficulty only compounds at large health systems. It's exactly what we built Synapse for," Jeffery Liu, co-founder and co-CEO of Assort Health, said in a statement. "Our proprietary model learns the patterns of specialty workflows and gets sharper with every deployment, and that's what lets us move past answering calls to automating the entire patient journey." MARKET SNAPSHOT In October, Assort Health garnered $76 million in Series B funding, bringing its total raise at the time to $102 million. The company previously secured $22 million in Series A funding in April 2025, after raising $3.5 million in seed funding in 2024. Other healthcare AI companies focused on administrative and operational work continue to draw investor and provider interest. In March, Amazon Web Services launched Amazon Connect Health, an agentic AI offering that integrates with providers' EHRs to perform administrative tasks such as patient verification, ambient documentation, appointment management, patient insights and medical coding. Other companies are also targeting patient access and call center workflows. In November, Tampa General Hospital tapped Hyro to introduce voice AI agents across patient access and call center operations. In January, Inova Health tapped Notable for AI agents supporting revenue cycle management, patient access workflows and referral management. Healthcare organizations are also directing more AI spending toward agentic tools. A Google Cloud report found 46% of healthcare executives said their organizations were allocating more than half of their future AI budgets to AI agents, while 44% said they were already adopting AI agents in production.