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Assort, A-very Helpful Bot, and What’s UpDoc?
By Jason Barry, Jack Troy, Virginia Hunt
June 29, 2026
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Together with
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“As fun as it sounds to ‘move fast and break things,’ you can’t break healthcare on your way to repairing it. A better mantra would be to ‘walk fast and don’t spill your drink.’”
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Doximity Chief Clinical Experience Officer Dr. Amit Phull
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Doximity’s “LinkedIn for Doctors” era is long gone, and Chief Clinical Experience Officer Dr. Amit Phull joined us on the latest Digital Health Wire Show share the defining chapters that brought the platform to its Era of AI. Dr. Phull gives us a behind-the-scenes look at going from zero telemedicine visits to 20M in six months, and how the platform has grown to meet the day-to-day needs of clinicians.
Thanks for stopping by.
Jason
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If you needed any more proof that communication friction is one of the biggest pain points for patients and providers, look no further than Assort Health’s just-closed $120M Series C – its third funding round in 18 months.
Assort started with a simple thesis. Co-founders Jon and Wang and Jeffery Liu first set out to unlock the front door of healthcare, because two things sit there that block everything downstream:
- The care protocols required to handle that first interaction
- The patient communications data that flows into the rest of the journey
The first call is an important moment. Mistakes here mean the patient never comes back, and Assort’s edge in preventing that is its Synapse agentic model.
- Synapse lets both technical and clinical internal teams deploy agents at scale with trusted outcomes.
- The model handles the most complex workflows at the highest automation and conversion rates, cutting implementation time from months to weeks.
Assort maintains a refined roster of voice agents. The lineup includes:
- Referrals & Fax Processing – ingests every incoming fax/referral, autofills missing info from phone calls it already handled, and triages misdirected referrals to the right doctor automatically (because the protocols already live in the system).
- Patient Intake – handles check-in and pre/post-visit forms while pre-filling 70% of forms from existing comm’s data, so patients don’t have to keep repeating the same story.
- Collections & Care Gaps – Tackles outbound for collecting payments and gap closure via “signal intelligence” in the EHR, which detects eligibility and reaches out automatically.
Patient Journey Memory ties it all together. The capability is built on three pillars.
- All products share the same two data sets and talk to each other, so a care gap surfaces wherever the patient happens to engage.
- Signal intelligence reads EHR signals (eligibility, demographics) and acts automatically.
- Each patient gets a personal AI agent that knows their context and preferences (text vs. voice vs. email, timing nuances like “don’t call during Thursday 6pm soccer practice”).
Next stop: everywhere. Every new tech generation sees a flood of solutions, then only a few survive. Agentic AI is about to hit that same shakeout, and Assort plans on sticking around.
- The funding was earmarked for bringing on veteran C-levels to make that happen, and being a frontier AI partner for every group they work with.
The Takeaway
Assort is looking to become the transformation partner for every healthcare provider in the country. It’s building bespoke solutions that understand each practice better than anyone, and it’s moving with enough urgency to raise three rounds in under two years.
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The Agentic Platform for Your Environment
Your care plans. Your patients. Every health system is unique, which is why Tucuvi tailors its agentic platform to the day-to-day realities of care delivery at each of its partners. With configurable protocols and seamless EHR integration from day one, LOLA is the AI voice agent care teams trust to reach every patient. See LOLA handle real care workflows with your use cases today.
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Solving Patient Leakage with Virtual-First Care
Patients expect more from their healthcare – easy self-scheduling, ample availability, and appointments that allow them to get high-quality care wherever and whenever they need it. If your health system isn’t offering that, someone else is. Download the new white paper from Ovatient to see how health systems can look beyond traditional telehealth solutions to deploy an EHR-integrated, virtual-first care model that expands patient access and choice, builds long-lasting care relationships, and reduces leakage.
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- What’s UpDoc? UpDoc just landed the first FDA-clearance for a patient-facing LLM, a massive milestone along AI’s path toward delivering care that’s historically required a licensed clinician. The clinical AI platform has a proprietary orchestration architecture that unifies clinical guidelines, longitudinal patient context, and physician governance to safely execute real-world care – like automatically adjusting insulin doses. The FDA has long debated how to regulate similar models, but the UpDoc clearance might be the first indication that they’re now comfortable enough with the tech to start approving more algorithms (at least if they can show they’re twice as effective as usual care).
- Digital Delivery of Cancer News: Learning you have cancer through an online portal may sound awfully impersonal, but the results of a survey in JAMA Network Open show a surprising number of people favor this method over talking to a doctor. Researchers got responses from 2.4k patients at a Texas cancer treatment center, finding that 23% preferred the portal to receive future diagnoses. Men (57%), users who accessed the portal at least once a week but not daily (42%), and people who previously found out they had cancer this way (54%) were more partial to the portal.
- A-very Helpful Bot: UnitedHealthcare is making strides in the rollout of Avery, a GenAI assistant that can provide cost estimates, identify in-network doctors, and even schedule appointments over the phone. The bot launched in March as part of the insurance giant’s multi-billion-dollar AI push to revive sagging profits and improve care coordination, with hopes of eventually selling these technologies to other healthcare companies. Avery is set to grow from about 7M to 21M eligible users this year, representing just under half of United’s members.
- AI Listens, but Doesn’t Hear: A preprint paper by Together AI and Stanford researchers highlighted an emotional intelligence gap plaguing four real-time voice AI models: GPT-Realtime-2, Gemini 3.1 Flash Live, Qwen3.5-Omni-Plus, and Omni Flash. One of the experimental scenarios had AI conduct an emergency dispatcher welfare callback. When the person on the other line insisted they were fine despite audibly crying, every model ended the call. It was interesting to see that three of the four systems reliably understood tone, but none took it into account.
- SimplePractice Premieres AI Aide: Practice management platform SimplePractice announced the addition of an AI assistant to support its network of over 250k mental health clinicians. The new Care Aide builds off of the site’s existing AI notetaker by supporting appointment preparation, treatment planning, intake review, and documentation to reduce administrative burden. The upgrade also includes a Session Sidekick feature that develops interactive discussions using past notes to promote in-session engagement and flow.
- Vali Health Banks $6M: Vali Health secured a $6M seed round to build out AI infrastructure in the home care space. The AI agents are apparently already saving clinicians 20 hours a week by completing 98% of administrative tasks independently, though all decisions are cross-checked by real people for added assurance. This funding boost may come at the perfect time as Vali’s demand has exploded, with the company having grown 400% in the past year.
- Tracking Gets People to the Track: A new Journal of the American Heart Association meta-analysis shows that phones and smartwatches could actually be improving physical activity – if used correctly. After compiling 14 clinical trials, researchers found that people with heart disease who used wearable tech or apps that tracked physical activity walked 1,100 more steps a day than those who didn’t. Features like goal-setting, feedback, and self-monitoring seem to be increasing motivation, but more research is needed to confirm how much of the difference is due to the smartwatch crowd being more active in general.
- LLM Pitfalls: An incisive JAMA viewpoint warned LLMs could offer lousy advice based on errors, biases, and outdated information baked into EHRs. The piece raises the example of a patient once diagnosed with panic attacks who was later found to have heart issues. If chest pain strikes, will an LLM take it seriously or downplay it as anxiety? The authors also argue for stronger patient privacy protections and greater data transparency when it comes to LLMs.
- Arbital Launches Atlas: Arbital Health launched ATLAS, a modeling tool to help ACOs evaluate financial performance under CMS’ new LEAD model (the 10-year successor to ACO REACH). The deadline pressure is real, as ACOs must evaluate provider practices by August under a benchmarking methodology most teams have never modeled. ATLAS lets them simulate provider impact on benchmarks, attribution, and projected shared savings, then stress-test the assumptions.
- Will AI Increase Healthcare Costs? Nobody doubts AI’s potential to improve care delivery, but its long-term impact on costs is still an open question. A new article in Health Affairs by Dr. David Brailer, who in the 2000s headed the U.S. “meaningful use” program to boost EHR adoption, makes the case that AI will definitely impact costs, it just won’t make them any smaller. Brailer sees AI as amplifying the forces that lead to healthcare inflation in the U.S.
- Dynamic Duo: DUOS added new tools to steer health plan members toward their benefits by acquiring Linkwell Health, marking another win for the senior-focused platform after a $130M investment round in October. Linkwell brings to the table predictive content intelligence, personalized engagement and omnichannel delivery that DUOS says will further close the gap between what’s offered to members and what they actually use. DUOS now serves more than 20 health plans nationwide, covering about 20% of U.S. adults.
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Making the Case for AI
Healthcare organizations have a lot to gain from implementing AI that can enhance coding accuracy and quality metrics, but securing buy-in from leadership is a crucial first step. Check out Navina’s new guide by Dr. Michael S. Barr to see exactly how to demonstrate clear financial benefits, ROI potential, and alignment with organizational priorities to help ensure AI projects are successful.
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Execution for Every Workflow
Health systems have no shortage of ideas for improving care and operations. Bunkerhill lets them bring those ideas to life – at scale, across service lines, and around the clock. Discover how the Carebricks platform is empowering clinical and operational teams to deploy AI agents that turn the data they have into the actions they need.
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- A New Path for ACCESS Model Participants: Building your CMS ACCESS program? Withings was accepted into the inaugural cohort as both a participant and a device partner via the ACCESS Tools Directory. Bring the same FDA-cleared, cellular-enabled devices into your program, including BPM Pro 2, capturing clinical measurements and patient-reported outcomes at the point of reading, purpose-built for value-based cardio-kidney-metabolic care.
- State of Payor Enrollment and Credentialing: Over half of provider orgs are losing revenue due to credentialing delays – with many missing out on over $1M annually. Medallion’s new report unpacks the forces quietly undermining operational and financial performance, and how leaders across the industry are addressing them. Head over to the full report to get insights tailored to your role and org type.
- The AI Hardware Built for Clinical Work: Phones were never meant to be propped on a desk for a 12-hour clinical day. Heidi Remote transcribes patient sessions offline, stores them securely on-device, and syncs to Heidi whenever you’re in range. Just clip on and get to work with the Heidi Remote.
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