Jon Wang

founder at @assort_health - voice AI for patient care navigation | prev stanford ML, UCSF med student, co-founder @shimmer_care

[Jon Wang @_JonWang]

Most healthcare AI is reactive. It waits.

A patient calls. AI answers.

But what about the appointments that never get scheduled? The care gaps that don't get closed? The revenue that ages out because staff are too stretched to follow up?

At @assort_health, we built Activate to fix exactly that. And today, we're sharing it publicly for the first time.

Activate has already been live across primary care, orthopedics, ENT, and more. AI agents reach out to patients first via phone, SMS, and email, to book appointments, fill schedules from waitlists, reactivate patients, and collect payments.

The results from early customers, all without a single staff touch:

🔷 61% of flu shot appointments booked through proactive AI outreach at Annapolis Internal Medicine
🔷 64% referral scheduling conversion at SENTA Partners
🔷 89% of patients paid outstanding balances at Twin Cities Orthopedics
🔷 53% of appointments rescheduled automatically after a weather closure at Boston Bone & Joint

And it gets smarter over time. Every conversation, inbound or outbound, feeds what we call Patient Journey Memory. Each touchpoint gets more informed and more personal. A patient calling in with a billing question can trigger Activate to follow up on related care needs: a mammography recommendation, an open referral, a missed appointment.

Inbound AI is the foundation. Proactive outreach is what makes it transformative.

Proud of what the team built. Excited for what's next.

More in Fierce Healthcare: https://t.co/foshz6hbQM

[Jon Wang @_JonWang]

Three years ago I came to @AAOE_OrthoExec alone. First conference we'd ever attended. Staffed the smallest booth you've ever seen with one of our customer's daughters helping me out. A handful of people at that conference took a chance on a company nobody had heard of. I've never forgotten that.

On Monday morning I got to come back and say thank you from the AAOE main stage.

What started as voice AI for scheduling has become something much bigger, and that's largely because of our partners in orthopedics. They pulled us further into the patient journey. Intake, registration, referrals, payments, proactive outreach. We followed their lead.

I also got to moderate a panel on the future of agentic AI in orthopedics. The operators in that room were honest about what's working (patients rating AI interactions 4.3 stars, capturing dozens of appointments a week that would have been lost), what's hard (change management, physician objections), and where this is all headed. Prior auth, revenue cycle. The conversation was real and I left more energized than when I walked in.

And then there was this. Kemuel Carey from Peninsula Orthopaedic Associates, one of our earliest customers, won the AAOE Innovator Award in part for his adoption of agentic AI to improve patient access. Kemuel bet on AI before anyone else was. Watching him get recognized for that this week was a full-circle moment I didn't expect to hit as hard as it did.

25% of OrthoForum practices are now on Assort. What we built in orthopedics, we've built the same way across 22 specialties. Over 8,000 providers. If you'd told me that in 2023 I would not have believed you.

Thank you to everyone who made this week what it was. This community built us.

[Jon Wang @_JonWang]

Being named to the Enterprise Tech 30 by @wing_vc and @NewcomerMedia alongside @OpenAI, @AnthropicAI, and @stripe is a huge honor. It’s also a reflection of something much bigger happening in healthcare.

In 2023, we learned that the hard part about patient access wasn't the voice AI. It was ingesting every unique set of rules and decisions into our system and following them with a high degree of accuracy. Every specialty, every provider, every payer, every patient scenario has its own logic. Get those nuances wrong and a patient gets routed incorrectly or doesn't get care at all. That's what we've been focused on from day one.

@assort_health is built to handle that complexity at a level others can’t, leveraging a compounding dataset of 125M+ patient interactions across 6,000 providers to continuously learn, adapt, and improve. What started as voice AI has evolved into a full AI agents platform spanning intake, scheduling, referrals, payments, and ongoing patient engagement, all connected and learning from each interaction.

The result isn't just automation. It's a system that ensures the right patient gets to the right provider at the right time, with a level of precision that actually works in the real world. With patient journey memory patients get memorable experiences, and they don't have to tell their story again or fill out another form.

Proud of the team building this, and grateful to the customers and partners helping shape it with us. We wouldn't be here without you. #ET30

[Jon Wang @_JonWang]

@kevinyang awesome stuff!

[Jon Wang @_JonWang]

The most important type of speed an organization can develop is speed to trust.

This is what I learned when I had the privilege of meeting with the legendary @MikeCoachk recently, and I’ll tell you why it resonates with me.

Coach K’s team-building philosophy is focused less on rules and more on standards. Things like making eye contact and telling each other the truth. His reasoning is simple: While you never own a rule (you either obey it or break it), teams can own standards together.

Once that happens, trust compounds, and communication becomes immediate. Suddenly, teammates believe each other the first time something is said. That’s speed to trust.

I’ve been thinking about this in the context of healthcare because it is one of the most trust-dependent systems in the world. Patients are supposed to trust their doctors, doctors need to trust their teams, and organizations need to trust their technology partners. The entire system runs on the strength of that trust.

This idea shows up constantly at @assort_health as we build AI agents that engage with patients every day. Healthcare organizations only adopt technology at scale when it is able to earn trust quickly. That only happens when technology is designed to manage the real complexities of care.

Turns out, speed to trust matters in healthcare just as much as it does for championship basketball teams.

[Jon Wang @_JonWang]

As we wrapped up an energizing week at #ViVEvent, one theme kept surfacing for me:

In most industries, 95% accuracy should be good enough. But if you’re building voice AI for healthcare, that extra 4.9% makes all the difference. That was a core focus of my fireside chat with the team at @livekit during the AI track at ViVE.

A lot of the market is still taking an approach that doesn’t meet that 99.9% standard: they’re spinning up GPTs, connecting them to phone lines, and calling it voice AI for healthcare. It works for the first few demos, maybe even the first few customers.

But it quickly breaks when it encounters the real surface area of healthcare: the complexity of nuanced scheduling rules, clinical triage, insurance constraints, language preferences, protocols upon protocols.

You don’t have the luxury of being “mostly right” in healthcare. You have to be 99.9% accurate. That’s why, at @assort_health, we don’t need to own frontier speech-to-text or text-to-speech – we own the intelligence that ensures our AI understands how healthcare actually works, and LiveKit provides the voice infrastructure that allows us to scale it reliably to serve clients like @SENTAPartners, @MiOrthoSurgeons, and Chesapeake Health Care.

Grateful to the LiveKit team for a thoughtful conversation on where voice AI in healthcare is actually headed.

[Jon Wang @_JonWang]

Keeping the front door of healthcare open is one of the industry’s most perplexing operational problems. For the right team, that's not a deterrent - it's the whole point.

I’m grateful to have had the opportunity to share the #ViVEvent stage with fellow builders shaping what healthcare will look like over the next decade. My core message was simple: @assort_health is focused on the complexity others avoid. From having been the first AI agent to answer calls and schedule appointments in 2023, to now powering 100M+ patient interactions across 5,000+ providers, we’re seeing what happens when AI is purpose-built for the nuances of healthcare. The result: materially expanded labor capacity, as much as 5% increase in appointment volume, and 4.5/5 patient satisfaction scores.

Huge thanks to my fellow panelists (and everyone who made it despite the East Coast weather) for a great discussion on what it really takes to challenge how things have always been done.

[Jon Wang @_JonWang]

Every patient will eventually have a personal AI care manager that knows their story better than anyone else.

At ViVE, I spoke with @IanKhanFuturist about what that future really looks like – and it starts somewhere unexpected: patient access.

Today, 70%+ of appointments are still scheduled by humans on the phone. Healthcare’s front door still runs on fragmented conversations and manual judgement, creating bottlenecks for patients and keeping practices and health systems operating on thin margins.

What we're building at @assort_health goes far beyond basic conversational AI – it’s designed to eliminate the access bottleneck altogether. We’re enabling AI agents that handle nuanced patient interactions, complex workflows, and real-world clinical scenarios, moving from reactive scheduling to intelligent, personalized care orchestration at scale.

#VIVEvent #AIinHealthcare

[Jon Wang @_JonWang]

Healthcare isn’t waiting for incremental change.

I'm excited to join Eunice Wu, Olivia Deitcher, and Maddie Hilal at #ViVEvent for "The New Guard of Digital Health" - a conversation about what happens when technical fluency meets genuine urgency.

We're all tackling different pieces of the healthcare puzzle, from AI diagnostics to patient access to care delivery. But what unites us is simpler: we're building with the advantage of not knowing what can't be done. A blank canvas on how to rethink the next generation of patient care.

Come hear what the next decade of healthcare looks like when it's shaped by people using a new playbook.

See you in LA. Feb 24, 2PM.

[Assort Health @assort_health]

We’re so proud to see our co-founders and company recognized by @forbes. It’s a reflection of the momentum behind our mission to transform patient access with specialty-specific agentic AI.

Grateful for our team, partners, and community.

Read the full story below

[Jon Wang @_JonWang]

@Forbes https://t.co/firMhyvnfz

[Jon Wang @_JonWang]

In 2021, I left medical school with nothing but a few wild ideas and a burning passion to improve patient access. Now we've powered over 70 million patient interactions!

Thank you @forbes for the recognition, and to our team, partners, and community for believing in our mission.

[Assort Health @assort_health]

Assort Health has raised its Series B at a $700M valuation, bringing our total funding to $102M.

At Assort, we are proving there is a better way--faster, simpler, and accessible care.

Thank you to @Nasdaq for celebrating this milestone with us 🚀

[Jon Wang @_JonWang]

https://t.co/IAe5cXrmUO

[Jon Wang @_JonWang]

A patient’s journey shouldn’t start with “please hold.” Today, we’re announcing $102M to ensure it never happens again.

Ten years ago, @GalymImanbayev and I shook hands on our first venture—a small nonprofit with a big ambition to make healthcare investing more impactful.

Today, we’re partnering again in a new way: a $76M Series B featured in @FortuneMagazine and led by @lightspeedvp, which brings @assort_health's total funding to $102M. Galym is joining our board, and we’re thrilled to welcome Paul Ricci (founding CEO of Nuance Communications) as a board advisor.

I left UCSF med school and Stanford AI research because I couldn’t accept that patients spend more time waiting on hold than with their doctors. Assort Health is making sure they never have to again.

The funding will be used to scale Assort OS: an all-in-one patient experience platform powered by agentic AI via voice, text, web, and email. It handles the most complex aspects of access, including scheduling, care navigation, lab coordination, prescription renewals, referrals, and more.

Before: endless hold times, wrong doctors, missed care.
After: seamless scheduling, faster care, happier patients.

What this means in practice: 89% shorter wait times, 98% resolution rates, and patient ratings > 4.6/5 across hundreds of organizations—driven by tens of millions of patient interactions at thousands of providers.

To every practice and health system tired of hold music: we’d love to show you a better way.

And if you’re excited to help us build the future of patient access, we’re hiring across growth, ops, and engineering.

With Assort, we’re ending the dreaded hold music—once and for all!

Huge appreciation to all of our investors for this round: @lightspeedvp, @felicis, @firstround, @chemistry_fund, @QuietCapital, @A_StarVC, @Liquid2V, @ApoloOhno,
@JoeMontana

Special thanks to
@agarfinks for telling our story so thoughtfully in
@FortuneMagazine. You can find it in the comments.

—and finally, to the @assort_health team, who are in the arena and shipping product for patients every day!

Thankful to our many supporters: @BrentonFargnoli,
@wakohler, @btrenchard, @kshenster, @matt_z_humphrey, @Mark_Goldberg_, @ethankurz, @amgarg, @ihfeeney, @meetalijavid, @pbcancerdoc, @CameronWoodward, @PickensAllison, @jdesai01, @andrewztan, @JenFriedman, @immad, @forwarddeploy, @doctitus, Sebastian Duesterhoeft, Kemuel Carey, Parinita Amin, MD, Aditya Khosla, Mandy McClellan, Roy Rosin, Emery Rosansky, and many more. We wouldn't be here without you!

#healthcare #AI #digitalhealth #patientexperience #SeriesB #startup #patientengagement

[Jon Wang @_JonWang]

https://t.co/IAe5cXrmUO

[Bill Trenchard @btrenchard]

The average American spends an entire workday each month just navigating healthcare logistics for their family. @_JonWang and @_jeff_liu imagine a different world, and are pushing at an incredible tempo to make it happen.

With the agentic AI platform they’re building @assort_health, you can call to schedule a doctor’s appointment whenever you want, not just when the office is open. There’s no listening to hold music or waiting for a callback. No getting transferred around or having your call dropped.

They’ve grown revenue more quickly than any company I remember working with @firstround. They’ve seen incredible investor interest (with today’s new $76M Series B round led by Lightspeed bringing their total raised to $102M).

But from the moment I started working with this team, I’ve been most impressed by their obsession with maintaining an unreasonably high pace so they can deliver for customers.

There are new voice AI demos every day, but Assort is a first mover that moved incredibly quickly. They’re already operating at an incredible scale, handling 40M+ patient interactions across thousands of providers.

But zero drop in quality. Their customers see 89% shorter patient call wait times, 98% resolution rates, and satisfaction scores consistently >94%.

They’ve got a strong roadmap ahead, moving from reactive scheduling to proactive care coordination, and expanding further into handling care navigation, lab coordination, prescription renewals, and physician referrals.

Another great @FortuneMagazine story from @agarfinks today on what they’re up to.

[Ethan Kurzweil @ethankurz]

Congrats to @AssortHealth on landing on the @forbes Next Billion Dollar Startups List - 2025! https://t.co/Xe3ELzQYB4
h/t @_JonWang @_jeff_liu

[Liz Wessel @lizwessel]

SO amped that 20% of the Forbes "Next Billion Dollar List 2025" is comprised of @firstround portfolio companies!!! These five are truly so special + this is SO deserved. Kudos @SurbhiSarnaSF, @nateps, @aditabrm, @raunakdoesdev, Tomer, Ben, @celinehalioua, Jeff and @_JonWang !