San Francisco — Assort Health has appointed Sunny Eappen, M.D., MBA, as its first Chief Medical Officer, adding a former hospital and health system executive to help guide the development and deployment of the company’s artificial intelligence agents for patient access and administrative workflows.
Eappen most recently served as President and Chief Executive Officer of the University of Vermont Health Network. He previously served as Chief Medical Officer and Senior Vice President of Medical Affairs at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.
In his new role, Eappen will advise Assort on the development of AI systems intended to help health care organizations improve scheduling, referrals, care-gap closure and other patient-facing processes.
The company said his work will focus on expanding patient access, improving the use of limited clinical capacity and ensuring that Assort’s technology reflects the operational needs of large health systems.
“Nearly every health system is trying to solve the same fundamental problem: how to connect patients to the right provider without unnecessary friction,” Eappen said. “I’ve spent much of my career trying to solve this problem from inside health systems.”
Eappen said health systems must use advances in AI to address growing demand for care and workforce limitations.
“I joined Assort because its platform can learn across organizations and specialties in a way no individual health system can replicate on its own,” he said.
Assort’s platform coordinates administrative workflows involving scheduling, referrals, care-gap closure, document processing, medication refills and payments.
The company said its technology incorporates more than 62,000 care protocols, 1.6 million decision pathways and 200 million specialty patient interactions. These data reflect provider preferences, subspecialty routing requirements, payer rules and other operational processes that influence patient access.
The protocols are created and updated through Assort’s Synapse engine and then adapted to the workflows of individual health care organizations.
“Dr. Eappen has spent his career leading the kinds of organizations we’re building for,” said Jon Wang, Founder and Co-Chief Executive Officer of Assort Health.
“He’s experienced firsthand the operational complexity behind every patient interaction, from scheduling and referrals to capacity planning and care delivery,” Wang said. “His clinical judgment and operating experience will shape how we build.”
Jeffery Liu, Founder and Co-Chief Executive Officer of Assort Health, said Eappen will help the company evaluate clinical workflows and care protocols as it develops more advanced applications.
“The hardest part of building AI for health systems is not automating a task,” Liu said. “It’s understanding how decisions made in one part of the organization affect whether a patient reaches the right clinician and whether that clinician’s time is used well.”
Eappen led the University of Vermont Health Network, a six-hospital rural academic health system with about 14,000 employees serving approximately 1 million patients in Vermont and northern New York.
The network includes an academic medical center, two community hospitals, three critical-access hospitals, a children’s hospital, and home health and hospice services.
Before joining the University of Vermont system, Eappen served as Chief Medical Officer and Chair of Anesthesiology at Massachusetts Eye and Ear.
He completed his anesthesiology residency at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, earned his medical degree from the University of Chicago and received an MBA from Yale University.
Eappen is a special advisor in anesthesiology at Mass General Brigham and remains a Clinical Professor of Anesthesiology at the University of Vermont’s Larner College of Medicine.
Assort also highlighted the expansion of its health systems leadership team. Imaad Rashied serves as Vice President of Health Systems and leads the company’s work with health system executives.
The company has also appointed Mitch Anderson, Michael Gaines, Alex Huber, Randy Kosmalski and Jake Puckett as Area Vice Presidents. Marie D’Aiuto has joined as Patient Access Consultant.
