Care management gaps are becoming a pressing problem as the provider shortage deepens, and Ellipsis Health just raised $45M of Series A funding to show why empathy is the answer.
Ellipsis put Sage front and center in the announcement, unveiling its emotionally intelligent AI care manager that expands staffing capacity through proactive patient engagement.
- Sage’s Empathy Engine leverages Ellipsis’ patented vocal biomarker tech and training from millions of real clinical conversations to support the patients driving a majority of healthcare costs: those with complex physical, behavioral, and social needs.
- Unlike traditional AI agents, Sage adjusts its tone and approach based on a patient’s emotional state, exactly how a human care manager would when conducting health risk assessments, post-discharge follow-ups, or care transitions.
The Series A investor roster suggests that Ellipsis has some strong tailwinds working for it.
- The round was led by Salesforce (workflow integration through Salesforce Health Cloud), Khosla Ventures (tech validation from an AI fund and early investor in OpenAI), and CVS Health Ventures (plenty of Aetna members to reach meaningful scale).
- Those investors will only help Ellipsis land and expand across more enterprises as it continues building evidence that Sage moves the needle with patient outcomes.
Competition is heating up. Companies like Hippocratic and Innovaccer have been rolling out fleets of AI agents that can handle routine tasks like appointment scheduling, but Ellipsis is setting out to prove that empathy is a difference maker in actual case management.
- It’s the little things between visits that can decide whether a patient gets their hypertension under control, like walking them through lab results or making sure they take their medication.
- It’s also the same little things that slip through the cracks when you have a staff shortage or burned out clinicians, and a little empathy could go a long way toward filling these gaps and driving the behavior change that leads to better outcomes.
The Takeaway
Ellipsis envisions a future for healthcare where AI can “extend human capabilities while preserving the empathy and clinical judgment that defines great care.” Sage is the tool that Ellipsis built to carve that future, and it now has $45M to put it in the hands of more providers.
