Nextech brings agentic AI to the front desk: Assort Health and EliseAI go 24/7 on patient access
Nextech announced multi-year partnerships with Assort Health and EliseAI to wire agentic AI into its specialty healthcare platform — two AI patient-access platforms integrated into scheduling and intake, starting with ophthalmology.
Specialty healthcare software provider Nextech announced Thursday it will bring agentic AI to what it calls "the front door of the patient experience," signing multi-year strategic partnerships with AI agent companies Assort Health and EliseAI to wire patient-access agents directly into its specialty practice operating system.
Rather than building its own agent, Nextech is giving practices a choice of two leading AI patient-access platforms, both integrated into the scheduling, intake, readiness, and communication workflows practices already run. The pitch is 24/7 patient access: patients can reach the practice when it suits them, and after-hours calls stop turning into lost appointments.
Two vendors, one operating system
The dual-vendor approach is deliberate. Nextech says each platform brings distinct strengths, and practices can pick whichever fits their workflow, patients, and operational priorities. The partnerships are structured as multi-year commitments with shared roadmaps, joint go-to-market planning, and co-investment — not white-label resale deals. "This is an important step in bringing agentic AI into specialty practice workflows in a practical, connected way," said Rusty Frantz, Nextech's chief executive.
The two partners arrive with very different résumés. Assort Health says its platform is built on more than 300 million specialty patient interactions, with models that update in real time, and it is live with hundreds of organizations including 40% of the Fortune 20 healthcare enterprises. It claims customers see a 5% lift in appointment volume, a 115% increase in labor capacity, up to $4.3 million in revenue captured per 100 providers, 97% resolution rates, and 79% referral-to-appointment conversion. EliseAI, for its part, says it supports more than 20 million conversations a month, has handled over 100 million patient conversations to date, and crossed $200 million in annualized revenue in 2026 — five consecutive years of 100% year-over-year growth.
Ophthalmology is the proving ground
The Assort side of the partnership gets the deepest technical treatment. Assort's own announcement says the companies will codevelop a joint AI agent offering for all Nextech customers, with a shared API roadmap deepening an existing Nextech Practice+ integration that already covers patient and appointment data, scheduling, and rescheduling.
Why ophthalmology first? Because it is hard. A single patient request can depend on provider subspecialty, visit history, testing requirements, insurance, referral status, location, urgency, and clinical escalation rules — retinal injection scheduling and cataract surgery coordination look nothing like booking a haircut. DuPage Ophthalmology, a Nextech practice, says Assort handles roughly 500 patient calls a week and saved the practice more than 60% of call time, enough to earn an expansion into after-hours coverage.
"Patients rarely call knowing the exact appointment type, provider, testing sequence, or next steps they need," said Jon Wang, Assort's co-founder and co-CEO. "The technology has to understand the patient and the practice well enough to resolve the request, not just route it." Assort frames the shift as the measure that matters for the next generation of healthcare AI: "measured by requests resolved, not conversations handled."
The pattern to watch
Healthcare is becoming one of the first verticals where agentic AI ships with concrete, auditable business outcomes — appointment volume, labor capacity, dollars recovered per hundred providers — rather than productivity vibes. That also raises the bar for trust: Nextech was named the 2026 Best in KLAS winner for Ambulatory Ophthalmology Solutions for the second consecutive year, and both vendors are betting that deep, joint-engineered workflow integration beats generic AI bolted onto the phone system.
The partnerships go live in front of an audience immediately: all three companies will showcase the new offerings at the American Academy of Ophthalmology's 2026 annual meeting in New Orleans, October 10–12 — Nextech at booth 2027, Assort at 3126, and EliseAI at 1061.