AI patient communication company Parakeet Health picked up $3 million in seed funding, led by Canvas Ventures, and inked multiple new provider deals.
Parakeet is a pre-series A company, led by health tech heavyweights who were executives at One Medical, Epocrates and Doximity and worked for Microsoft and Twitter.
The startup developed an AI call center agent that can answer inbound calls, make outbound calls and text patients. Parakeet seeks to improve patient experience, staffing challenges and revenue leakage for provider organizations. The solution can schedule appointments, manage referrals, assist with billing and answer frequently asked questions. It is also available in multiple languages.
The startup's seed round was led by Canvas Ventures, with participation from CoFound Partners, StoryHouse Ventures and several prominent individual investors, including former One Medical CEO Tom Lee, M.D., and former Twitter Chief Technology Officer Adam Messinger.
Many provider organizations have administrative staff answer the phone during business hours and use an after-hours answering service that takes patient messages. But front desk staff usually have more calls than they can handle, and they suffer from burnout and answering fatigue.
Jung Park, CEO and co-founder of Parakeet Health, told Fierce Healthcare that half of practices say their biggest challenge is staffing. Post pandemic, the administrative staffing issues are more acute, Parakeet co-founder Eric Mao explained. Administrative staff have empathy fatigue, and there are better jobs out there that are less stressful, he continued.
Practices stand to lose precious dollars from this dynamic, Parakeet Health executives note. When a patient call center is run by AI, the bot always answers the phone. AI can also reduce revenue leakage by calling patients on the waitlist when a patient cancels at the last minute or by following up on patient referrals to the practice.
For value-based care organizations, the platform can also be programmed to make outbound checkup calls to patients on a schedule.
Parakeet prides itself on honing its voice technology to sound natural to the human ear and can handle more complex speech.
“I've been doing this for many years to get it responsive, to sound natural, to have interrupts, to pick up your name properly, the right spelling, those are all the nuances that … can make or break,” Mao said.
Parakeet has deployed with virtual primary care provider Galileo, virtual genetic counseling leader Genome Medical and multisite skin care provider Medical Dermatology and Cosmetic Surgery.
In six months of deployment at health systems, Parakeet has reduced patient acquisition costs by more than half (from $8.38 to $4.09) and freed up time for front desk staff to engage in higher value patient interaction, the company claims.
“We want them to be interacting with patients and not necessarily answering the call when the patient's right there in front of you,” Park said.
Appointment scheduling gets complicated fast, the founders of Parakeet Health told Fierce Healthcare. Providers often have preferences of when they see new patients and established patients or how long to block out time per type of patient visit. The solution is highly sophisticated and tailored to each healthcare organization.
“When you get into the weeds of stuff, provider schedules are really nuanced and customized … So it's very difficult to build a highly customizable system that works for all of these individual practices, that have their custom scheduling rules and make it personalized to them, [and] adapt to their script as well,” Mao said.
Park has found that patients are actually starting to change their behavior based on the 24/7 availability of the AI call center. He said patients have scheduled appointments at 2:00 a.m., because the bot will always answer.
"Parakeet is gaining real traction with provider organizations and health systems because they're addressing a critical challenge—scaling patient communication,” Rebecca Lynn, chief investor at Canvas Ventures, said in a statement. “As these systems expand, managing patient outreach, follow-ups and scheduling becomes an enormous strain on resources, often overwhelming staff and impacting the quality of care; plus health systems are leaving a lot of money on the table when it comes to refilling cancellations and acquiring new patients from referrals.”
She continued: “Parakeet’s AI-driven voice platform changes that by automating these processes, allowing health systems to maintain high-touch communication without added complexity. As more large systems see the tangible results Parakeet is delivering, I have no doubt they’ll jump onboard. The team’s deep healthcare expertise, combined with their ability to integrate into existing workflows, gives me a lot of confidence in what comes next."
Parakeet’s founding team includes Park, who previously held executive positions at One Medical and Epocrates; Mao, who led product and engineering teams at Microsoft and Primer AI; and CTO Aaron Lee, who was an engineering team leader at Rippling and Twitter. Former Doximity CRO and One Medical SVP Paul Jorgensen currently serves as strategic adviser and also invested in the company, according to a press release said.
There's a growing list of startups using generative AI to make patient and health plan member communication more efficient. Startup Hippocratic AI developed a generative AI-based, task-specific healthcare agent. The startup, which launched out a stealth in 2023, aims to build out what it refers to as the first large language model for healthcare with an initial focus on non-diagnostic, patient-facing applications.
Startup Fair Square Medicare is using advancements with generative AI to build AI-based voice agents to screen seniors for insurance coverage and improve and streamline the customer experience. The company is now offering this technology as an enterprise product for large insurance distributors and carriers.