Healthcare AI Startup Secures $13M to Transform Patient Access Through Intelligent Call Center Automation
A groundbreaking healthcare artificial intelligence company has officially launched with substantial backing to tackle one of the industry’s most pressing challenges: patient access to care. Attuned Intelligence has announced its emergence from stealth mode alongside a $13 million seed funding round, with Radical Ventures and Threshold Ventures leading the investment.
The Patient Access Crisis in American Healthcare
The American healthcare system faces a severe patient access problem that’s reaching critical levels. Hospital call centers across the nation are drowning in demand while struggling with chronic understaffing. The financial burden is staggering—healthcare facilities collectively spend tens of billions of dollars annually operating these call centers.
Despite this massive investment, most facilities operate at approximately 60% of their required staffing capacity. High employee turnover rates and persistent workforce shortages create a perfect storm that leaves countless patients unable to connect with healthcare providers when they need assistance most. This gap between patient needs and available resources represents both a humanitarian crisis and an operational nightmare for healthcare administrators.
Introducing a Safety-First AI Solution
Attuned Intelligence has developed a specialized voice AI platform specifically engineered for hospital and health system call center environments. Unlike generic automation tools, this system was built from the ground up with healthcare’s unique requirements in mind—particularly the need for absolute safety and reliability in high-stakes situations.
The platform’s architecture enables it to answer patient calls instantly while safely managing up to 70% of all incoming interactions without human intervention. This isn’t about replacing human care but rather augmenting it intelligently.
According to Domenic Donato, co-founder and CEO of Attuned, the company was established specifically to address this monumental healthcare access challenge. The vision centers on ensuring every patient phone call receives an answer and resolution while providing operations teams with real-time visibility and control.
How the Technology Works
The supervised AI system operates through a sophisticated multi-agent architecture. Behind the scenes, more than half a dozen specialized AI agents work collaboratively, each handling specific responsibilities. Some agents focus on understanding language and patient intent, while others provide continuous safety supervision to ensure appropriate responses and escalation protocols.
Key capabilities include:
Multilingual Support: The platform breaks down language barriers by communicating with patients in multiple languages, ensuring equitable access for diverse patient populations.
Intelligent Triage: Routine inquiries like appointment scheduling, billing questions, and records requests are handled autonomously, while urgent medical situations trigger immediate escalation to appropriate human staff.
Complete Transparency: Operations leaders receive real-time dashboards showing exactly how the system makes decisions, what calls are being handled, and which require human attention.
Continuous Availability: The system operates around the clock, ensuring patients can access assistance whenever they need it, not just during standard business hours.
Real-World Results at Community Health Centers
The platform has already demonstrated impressive results in live deployment scenarios, particularly within safety-net healthcare providers that serve vulnerable populations.
Lowell Community Health Center serves as a compelling case study. This facility provides care to approximately 40,000 patients each year and faced typical call center challenges. After implementing Attuned’s platform, the center achieved full deployment in just 10 days—a remarkably fast timeline for healthcare technology implementation.
The AI system now handles every call coming into the main line, operating 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It manages the full spectrum of patient needs, from genuine medical emergencies and medication-related questions to administrative matters like billing inquiries and medical record requests. All of this occurs seamlessly across multiple languages.
The automation rate is particularly noteworthy: Lowell CHC is on pace to automate more than 70% of its call center operations. This frees up human staff to focus on complex cases and direct patient care rather than routine administrative tasks.
Padma Sastry, Chief Information Officer at Lowell Community Health Center, emphasized that the partnership directly supports their organizational mission: streamlining patient access, ensuring language accessibility, and maintaining exceptional patient experiences throughout every interaction.
Scaling to Meet Enterprise Demand
Beyond individual health centers, Attuned is proving its capability to handle enterprise-scale deployments. One health system currently scaling with the platform receives nearly 50,000 calls weekly—a volume that would require a massive human workforce but is managed efficiently by the AI system.
The company reports overwhelming demand from health systems nationwide, currently onboarding multiple hospitals each week. The platform already handles thousands of calls daily and continues to expand rapidly.
Strategic Investment for Growth
The $13 million seed funding will fuel several strategic initiatives designed to accelerate the company’s impact across the healthcare sector.
Product development will receive significant investment, allowing the engineering team to enhance capabilities, refine the AI models, and expand the range of situations the platform can handle safely and effectively.
Team expansion represents another priority. As demand grows, Attuned plans to bring on additional talent across engineering, healthcare operations, implementation, and customer success functions.
Most importantly, the capital enables expanded deployments across hospitals and safety-net providers nationwide, bringing the technology to more patients who desperately need improved access to care.
The Future of Healthcare Access
Attuned Intelligence represents a new approach to solving healthcare’s access challenges—one that combines cutting-edge AI technology with a deep understanding of healthcare’s unique requirements around safety, oversight, and patient experience.
By automating routine interactions while maintaining human oversight for complex situations, the platform creates a hybrid model that leverages the best of both artificial and human intelligence. This approach doesn’t eliminate healthcare workers but rather empowers them to focus on the cases where human judgment, empathy, and expertise matter most.
As staffing challenges continue to plague healthcare facilities and patient populations grow increasingly diverse in their language and access needs, solutions like Attuned’s supervised AI platform may become essential infrastructure for maintaining equitable, efficient healthcare access in America.