Imaad Rashied on Assort Health

Sathvik Bilakanti: Imaad, thanks for coming on. Let's start with the problem. Why is calling a doctor's office in 2026 still one of the worst experiences in healthcare?

Imaad Rashied: Because the phone is the last unowned channel. Every health system has invested in a patient portal, a scheduling platform, an EHR. Almost nobody has invested in the front desk phone line, and that is where the majority of patients still start. You have hold times of fifteen or twenty minutes, abandonment rates north of thirty percent, and every abandoned call is a patient who does not get scheduled.

Sathvik Bilakanti: So where does Assort sit in that stack?

Imaad Rashied: We answer the call. Our voice agent picks up on the first ring, understands why the patient is calling, and then completes the task inside the system of record. That could be booking, rescheduling, a refill request, a referral question, or routing to a human when it should be a human. The important part is the write back into the EHR. If the work does not land in Epic or Athena, the staff still has to do it, and you have not saved anyone any time.

Sathvik Bilakanti: You spend most of your time with health system operators. What actually gets a deal moving?

Imaad Rashied: Specificity. Generic AI pitches die in committee. What moves is walking in with their own numbers: here is your call volume by department, here is your abandonment rate at eight in the morning, here is what that costs you in unbooked appointments per month. Then we scope one department, usually orthopedics or primary care, and we go live in weeks, not quarters.

Sathvik Bilakanti: What do you measure once you are live?

Imaad Rashied: We report resolution rate, not deflection. Deflection just means a human did not touch the call. Resolution means the patient got what they called for. We also watch escalation quality, because a clean handoff with context is a good outcome, and containment for its own sake is not. Operators trust the system faster when you are honest about the calls you should not handle.

Sathvik Bilakanti: How does a pilot become a system wide rollout?

Imaad Rashied: Two things. First, the clinic staff have to want it, which means the agent has to make their day quieter rather than create a new queue to clean up. Second, you need an executive sponsor who owns access as a metric. When the person accountable for access sees their abandonment rate drop, expansion becomes their idea instead of ours.

Sathvik Bilakanti: Last question. Where does voice AI in healthcare go over the next few years?

Imaad Rashied: Inbound is the wedge. The bigger opportunity is proactive outreach that is genuinely useful, care gap closure, pre visit preparation, post discharge follow up. The systems that win will treat the voice layer as infrastructure, not as a chatbot project, and they will hold it to the same reliability standard as the rest of their clinical stack.