Insight Health built patient-facing artificial intelligence agents to handle routine clinical tasks for medical practices, from intake to managing patient histories and follow-up.
The new startup, which launched out of stealth, says its now ready to extend its reach to more clinics.
There's a growing list of AI startups focused on automating medical documentation, but those tools just focus on faster note-taking to collect information during the patient visit, according to Jaimal Soni, co-founder and CEO of Insight Health.
"After talking to hundreds of physicians and hundreds of providers more generally, a key pain point for them is really the amount of routine work that they experience, and a lot of that is really on the patient-facing side," Soni said in an interview providing a first look at Insight Health's AI agents as it launches to the broader market.
"One of the key motivations for us is, how do we offload the incredible amount of routine clinical work to AI in a safe and trustworthy way, to allow providers to see more patients and allow them to work at the top of their license? What we built is a virtual care system that can meet independently with patients starting from a screening or referral screening," Soni said.
In-clinical conversations are often incomplete, missing key history, context or patient-reported symptoms. This information is typically gathered before and after an appointment, but it takes time for clinicians to collect and document it.
This repetitive work can bog down clinical teams. Insight Health's approach is not just to reduce documentation burdens but to use agentic AI to create a richer, more up-to-date baseline for each patient, so clinicians can communicate more effectively. The use of AI can also lead to better engagement with patents, Soni attests.
He cited the example of a specialty medical practice where the first patient visit could take 45 minutes. "Historically, up to half of that, and maybe even more, is the routine history capture to understand what's going on with the patient and family history. We can change their model, where our virtual agent is meeting with the patient ahead of time, giving the patient a voice, letting them share their history as long as they need to," he said. "The providers now have that going into a visit. So, what would normally take 20-25 minutes of that visit now gets shortened to around three or four minutes. They confirm a few things, and then the providers can spend the majority of that time during the patient visit really focusing on the care plan, how to make that patient better, whereas before, they'd be running out of time or running over schedule."
The startup was founded by two doctors and two product leaders with experience at Twilio and Segment. Pankaj Gore, M.D., is the director of Brain Tumor and Skull Base Surgery at the Providence Brain and Spine Institute in Oregon and Eric Stecker, M.D., is a cardiologist and professor of medicine at Oregon Health and Science University, and they both serve as co-chief medical officers. Soni and fellow co-founder Saran Siva, who serves as chief technology officer, worked together at customer data platform Segment, which was acquired by Twilio and they helped launched Segment for Healthcare.
Insight Health's flagship agent, called Lumi, communicates directly with patients through voice or text to gather their detailed disease-specific history and update medication lists, much like a physician or a physician assistant. Medical practices also can use Lumi for autonomous patient follow-up appointments.
Over the past year, the company has built out other agents to process incoming referrals, for chart pep and an AI scribe tool.
"We're building a clinical co-pilot that really pairs with the patient and the provider across that continuum of care," Soni said. "It has a safety net in place if it needs to be escalated or routed accordingly. We always have a clinician in the loop, but it offloads that clinical side to this virtual care agent."
The company's AI-powered technology is integrated with a number of electronic health record vendors including athenahealth, NextGen, AdvancedMD, DrChrono and Office Practicum, with an Epic integration in the works.
Insight Health primarily works with private practices and its customers include Coastal Health Specialty Care, Santiam Hospital, The Oregon Clinic as well as clinics within top 10 health systems, according to executives.
The company's agents have handled more than 100,000 clinical conversations autonomously, to date, and about 1,500 clinicians across multiple specialties are using the platform daily, the company said.
"We're seeing on average 10 to 20 minutes per visit saved by these providers," Soni said. "The benefits go beyond the in-visit appointment. Providers can meet with the patient, offload the routine elements and it meaningfully reduces the after-hours charting and cuts down on 'pajama time'."
Last year, Insight Health raised $4.6 million in seed funding backed by Kindred Ventures. The startup used the funding to build out what Soni calls "safe AI" with strong foundations in safety, security and trust. Healthcare doesn't yet have an industry-wide standard or regulation to govern the use of AI.
"A lot of what we decided to build is really this foundation element which allows us to be ahead of the curve, where, when this standard does get defined, we're already there. We're already doing checks and balances, and it's pretty adaptable to whatever framework does get defined, whether it's from legislatures or from clinics themselves. We're seeing some of these clinics define their AI policies," Soni said.
The company also has focused on enhancing the patient experience when interacting with the AI agents. "Things like the voice-to-voice, ensuring that it's a natural conversation with patients and offering multiple languages. And then dealing with a relatively wide variety of age groups and technology experiences, just ensuring that it's applicable across all types of patients, not just the ones that are tech forward," he said.
The healthcare AI agent market is rapidly growing with new players as well as established vendors adding AI capabilities. Insight Health stands out by offering an end-to-end solution on the patient-facing clinical side, Soni attests.
"Our goal is to align perfectly to the full workflow within the clinic, not just part of it, starting from that screening or referral to in-visit, to post-visit, all of that has to work together. There's been decades of clinics being hamstrung by the technology they're able to use. We've seen clinics start to leapfrog to AI and start to adopt it, but one of the things we've heard is that there's a lot of point solutions," he said. "Our focus is actually tying it all together across that journey to ensure that whatever gets said from the intake side or screening is passed through to the provider during the visit, and then also that thread is carried through the lifetime relationship between that patient and provider."