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Building Popai together: bringing AI to the heart of patient engagement. At Team8, we believe the future of healthcare will be built on trust and data as the basis for infrastructure and technology that empowers, not burdens, clinical teams. That belief led us to help build Popai Health, which has just announced an $11 million round led by Team8, NEA, Essen Health Care, and other strategic partners. Popai is building the foundational platform for 'Patient Phone Conversation Intelligence': transforming phone call interactions between care teams and patients into real-time clinical and operational insight. Where voice meets value: A new chapter for care management. The shift to value-based care has become a defining movement in healthcare. It promises to raise care quality while lowering cost. But while the thesis is strong, the execution remains deeply challenging. In the domain of Care management under value-based care, massive data processing, continuous decision-making, and scalable patient engagement is required. The reality on the ground is still manual, fragmented, and labor-intensive. But where do most patient interactions happen? In care management, over the phone. Over 15 million patient calls take place daily in the United States, and most of them contain critical information that is untapped and unanalyzed. These conversations contain the most immediate signals of risk, need, and opportunity among patients. Yet, in most healthcare systems, they disappear into the void, leaving clinical teams overwhelmed and patients underserved. What's missing in the shift to data-driven care. Modern healthcare runs on data. Electronic health records capture results and outcomes, but not the decision journey. Structured forms miss patient narratives. Natural language processing can transcribe, but understanding meaning, context, and intent requires a purpose-built layer. However, it overlooks the most human data source of all, conversation. This is where Popai's AI comes in. Voice interactions are clinically rich, capturing diagnostic reasoning, uncertainty, and decision-making nuance. They are contextually deep, revealing the messy realities of social determinants, behavioral triggers, and patient priorities. They are operationally critical, driving triage, scheduling, escalation, and follow-up workflows. Turning dialogue into clinical intelligence. Popai's platform analyzes every second of a care management call, turning unstructured dialogue into insight. It goes further than documentation; It understands. By embedding healthcare-trained AI directly into phone-based workflows, Popai can auto-generate compliant summaries, extract actionable clinical and operational signals, trigger downstream workflows in real time, and reduce the documentation burden for clinicians by 20 percent or more while maintaining healthcare-grade security and HIPAA compliance. The platform is already implemented at leading organizations like Essen Healthcare and Clover Health, where it analyzes more than 18 million minutes of patient conversations. Building for the future: infrastructure that listens and learns. Healthcare is undergoing a similar kind of transformation that enterprise IT faced a decade ago: a shift from static records to dynamic interaction streams. Just as MongoDB and Snowflake emerged to handle data complexity, Popai is building the first infrastructure layer purpose-built for clinical conversation. * Capture includes multi-party voice, overlapping dialogue, and ambient context. * Privacy requires context-aware de-identification and compliance. * Storage that supports queryable, schema-flexible conversation archives. * Analysis that detects intent, surface clinical reasoning, and trigger workflows. * Integration into care management systems and population health tools. Founder-Market fit: why this team, why now. When we met Eyal Gurion, Popai's Co-Founder and CEO, his clarity on the problem was immediate. Eyal previously led value-based care enablement at Elevance Health and had experienced firsthand the implementation gap between value-based ambition and care team capability. Joining forces with him were his co-founders, Chief Product Officer Michael Latar and Chief Technology Officer Elad Levy. Both bring years of experience from Aidoc, one of the most advanced clinical AI companies, achieving unprecedented FDA clearance on their AI capabilities. At Aidoc, Michael led the AI product platform, while Elad oversaw delivery and engineering for mission-critical healthcare infrastructure. Their combined expertise in product strategy, AI infrastructure, and provider-facing deployment is exactly what it takes to build a company like Popai. A voice-first data layer: the next strategic frontier in health. Voice is not just another dataset. It is the most real-time, expressive, and underutilized source of patient intelligence in the system. Popai is turning that blind spot into a strategic advantage. By owning the infrastructure for phone-based care engagement, they are unlocking entirely new capabilities in risk detection, patient engagement, population health, and real-world evidence. And critically, they are doing it without adding burden to care teams. This is what high-leverage AI looks like: workflow embedded, intelligent, and invisible. The Team8 thesis in action. Popai is the embodiment of what we aim to build at Team8 Health. A meaningful mission, with real impact on reducing administrative burden, improving patient experience and optimizing care delivery. A technical edge, based on proprietary infrastructure, not just user interface. A high-caliber team, with founder-market fit and repeat product leaders. A market pull, with early adoption by serious players. As we outlined in our broader research on Voice and AI in healthcare, conversations are the goldmine of clinical intelligence, but only if we build the right tools to mine them. Popai is doing just that.

Essen Health Care opens a state-of-the-art heart and Imaging Center in the Bronx. Essen Health Care, one of the Bronx's largest community-based medical networks, has opened a brand-new cardiovascular and diagnostic imaging center at 2601 Halperin Avenue - a major step forward in expanding access to advanced heart care for local residents. For more than 25 years, Essen Health Care has served the Bronx with a mission to make quality, comprehensive care accessible and convenient. The new center continues that promise by offering cardiology, vascular care, and diagnostic imaging all under one roof - so patients can get the specialized services they need without leaving their neighborhood. Bringing advanced heart care home. "Heart disease remains one of the leading health challenges in our community," said Dr. Katsa, Medical Director at Essen Health Care. "This new center helps patients detect, treat, and manage heart conditions earlier and more effectively." Among the center's highlights is the addition of Coronary CT Angiography (CCTA) - a non-invasive, cutting-edge test that allows doctors to view the heart's arteries in remarkable detail. The technology provides faster diagnoses, lower radiation exposure, and earlier detection of disease - tools that can quite literally save lives. Comprehensive, connected care. Essen's integrated approach extends beyond heart imaging. The new location includes vascular and podiatry services, allowing doctors to identify early warning signs of heart disease, such as poor leg circulation or Peripheral Artery Disease (PAD), and treat them before they become more serious. Access and convenience. Patients can expect same-day appointments, walk-in availability, and coordinated care between specialists. "We don't want anyone to delay getting their heart checked," Dr. Katsa added. "When it comes to your heart, every moment counts." The grand opening celebration will take place on October 22, 2025, from 5 to 8 PM, featuring music, refreshments, and guided tours of the new space. Essen Health Care's new Cardiovascular and Diagnostic Imaging Center | 2601 Halperin Avenue, Bronx, NY 10461 | Grand Opening: October 22, 2025, 5 - 8 PM | Learn more at essenhealthcare.com Sponsored content disclaimer: The information and advice displayed in this story are those of individual sponsors and guests and not Nexstar Media Group, Inc.