San Francisco-based Ellipsis Health has built an AI voice agent designed to support patients with complex physical, behavioral and social needs, who tend to rack up the majority of healthcare costs. The agent, called Sage, was built using data from millions of live clinical patient calls over several years.
Ellipsis says Sage’s vocal biomarker technology can help it adjust its tone and care approach to a patient’s emotional and mental state. “Care management is not just about collecting information and performing tasks for the patient,” said Ellipsis’s Mainul Mondal, “but also listening to them, being supportive as they move through their care journey and understanding what are the most important priorities to them.”
Human-centered care
A shortage of healthcare workers and an increasingly hard-to-navigate healthcare system is creating sub-optimal conditions for both workers and patients. Healthcare needs “AI that can extend human capabilities while preserving the empathy and clinical judgment that defines great care,” said Amit Khanna of Salesforce, which co-led Ellipsis’ Series A round with Khosla Ventures and CVS Health Ventures.
Ellipsis is using Salesforce’s Health Cloud platform, a patient-centered care platform that combines electronic medical records as well as non-clinical data from, for example, wearable tech devices. The combination is “delivering measurable improvements in healthcare operations and patient outcomes,” said Ellipsis’ Mondal.
Ellipsis will use the funding to expand Sage with healthcare providers, payers and care managers.
Supplementing humans
Ellipsis is intended to help busy healthcare professionals in coordinating and managing patient care between visits. “I’ve seen how hard it is to deliver quality care between visits,” said Khosla’s Hal Paz, a former practicing physician and former head of Penn State’s Hershey Medical Center.
“Voice-based care management has become essential, but it’s nearly impossible to scale cost-effectively or without significant loss of quality,” Paz added. “Sage stands apart by training its AI on real clinical conversations, enabling emotionally intelligent, context-aware support, even for the most complex patients.”
