Hospitals are overflowing with data, but not with time. For case managers, who coordinate care, manage documentation, and navigate insurance hurdles, the administrative burden can consume up to 60 percent of their day. That inefficiency costs hospitals money, delays care, and drains skilled professionals of their clinical potential.
Ascertain, a Cure Collaboration Residency company born out of Northwell Health and the Aegis Ventures studio, is lightening this administrative load with a proprietary artificial intelligence (AI) solution that helps hospitals reshape how they handle back-office workflows. The company’s case management assistant streamlines and automates tasks, freeing staff to spend time where it matters most: with patients.
In April, Ascertain announced $10 million in Series A funding in a financing round led by Deerfield Management, an affiliate of Cure, with strategic participation from Northwell Health. The investment will accelerate Ascertain’s growth and expansion to reach new clients. The result: higher-quality patient care, faster care journeys and more cost-efficient care delivery.
Recognizing a Need to Improve Care Delivery with AI
Ascertain CEO Mark Michalski, MD, who is also Chief Information Officer for Deerfield, is an engineer and a radiologist. He previously worked for Amazon and witnessed how AI and machine learning augmented that company’s healthcare brands.
“I saw how technology could change the way someone engages their healthcare, and in particular how artificial intelligence could scale our ability to deliver care,” he explained.
Case management was an area ripe for improvement. The heavy burden of manual administrative tasks leaves less time for high-impact work, such as care planning and the management of complex patients.
“It is one of the pieces of healthcare delivery that is poorly serviced,” Michalski continued. “All of the things that it takes to deliver care are managed by case managers working behind the scenes. Some of them are nurses deeply trained in clinical medicine. But they don’t have the capability to scale to the size of their communities.”
That was especially so for Northwell Health. New York’s largest healthcare system treats more than 2 million people each year at more than 900 hospitals and care centers. Ascertain created AI technologies to help Northwell case managers better handle work that is crucial to ensuring patients receive effective care and insurance authorizations, and hospitals and healthcare providers receive timely payment for their services.
“The specific work of case managers varies depending on where they sit within the healthcare system. They’re the people working to ensure that patients get the right quality of care and that it is delivered efficiently,” added Chris Mitchell, Ascertain’s Chief Operating Officer.
Mitchell, who has a background in digital health, finance and investment banking, met Michalski through a mutual colleague. He shared his excitement for applying AI to streamline the administrative healthcare tasks that have sapped clinicians of some of the passion they once had for patient care.
Introducing Agentic AI
Key to Ascertain’s product is agentic AI, a type of generative AI that expands the capacity of machine learning tools. Michalski explained that large language models (LLMs) — sets of data that fuel generative AI — do not have great memory, for example. An LLM may create a plan but cannot enact it autonomously. Agentic AI adds context to enable LLMs to do more.
“With agentic AI, we’re giving the LLM brain arms, legs and eyes so it can interact with the world. We’re giving it some contextual and working knowledge to create and implement a plan,” said Michalski.
Ascertain’s product automates time-consuming workflows, including administrative tasks such as documentation, prior authorizations and compliance. It enables case managers to focus more on improving the quality and efficiency of patient care.
“Our product tries to remove some of the tedious and repetitive but very important work from a case manager’s plate so they can focus more on analytical thinking — whether communicating with patient and clinical teams or dealing with scenarios that need more human oversight and attention,” said Mitchell.
Part of the Cure Ecosystem
The physical location at Cure’s headquarters in New York City brings great benefit to Ascertain and its team.
“It’s an incredible space to work from and has helped build stronger camaraderie and our team culture. Now people want to come into the office every day,” said Mitchell. “We’ve also gotten to know a number of the other companies and residents on the floor who are doing things related to what we're building. So there’s a sense of community beyond just Ascertain.”
“There was a conference at Cure hosted by Deerfield that focused on bringing all parts of the healthcare ecosystem together to talk about the impact of artificial intelligence, and Ascertain was part of that discussion,” added Michalski. “Cure is a community of like-minded folks who want to see meaningful impacts in healthcare and life sciences in various ways. We’re all here for the same reason.”
Building on its experience with Northwell, Ascertain is now well positioned to partner with other healthcare systems to drive greater efficiency and improve patient care. Looking five years down the road, Michalski hopes that Ascertain’s digital solution might remind physicians why they got into medicine in the first place.
“When I went to medical school, all the doctors who were older and starting to retire said things like, ‘Medicine is so broken, but don't worry — your generation is going to be the one to fix it.’ I'm a little over halfway to being one of those people, and I don't want to say the same thing to the next generation of doctors,” Michalski maintained.
“If in five years Ascertain has solved many of the complexities of healthcare so my colleagues, many of whom have left medicine for various reasons, now want to come back, I think we will declare success,” he added. “We want to return to being with patients for those human connections — the reasons we all put on our medical school applications. I'd love for Ascertain to be a huge part of why that happened.”
Ascertain’s Advice for Entrepreneurs
While Ascertain is in its infancy, Michalski and Mitchell have already learned a few things they can share with other entrepreneurs looking to launch a startup. For them, it’s about connection and commitment.
“Get close to the people you're trying to serve. Learn the language they use and feel whatever pains or challenges they're dealing with,” said Mitchell. “If you have deep customer empathy, connecting to that mission helps propel you better than just about anything else.”
“Startups are about resilience, drive and commitment,” Michalski concluded. “You can't predict how the path of your startup will go. The best way to make sure you stay committed is do something you can see in your mind's eye and enthralls you to make that vision a reality. Also make sure you don't take the journey alone. Do it with great people you want to travel the journey with.”