A clinic can have the right doctor, the right treatment and a patient who wants both, yet still struggle to get an appointment completed and paid. Somewhere between the telephone, the referral and the insurance approval, the machinery stalls. Albert Katz came to know that machinery from the inside. Before co-founding Flagler Health, he worked in the finances and operations of a musculoskeletal practice. The body had specialists. The business needed help.
- Flagler sells software and operational support to practices treating bones, joints, muscles and pain.
- It connects patient identification, scheduling, care management and billing inside existing medical records.
- A $50 million Series B in August 2026 brought announced funding to $63 million.
They wanted the tools, not the takeover
The original idea, as Katz later described it, was to acquire physician practices and improve their operations with technology. Then prospective customers supplied an inconvenient piece of information: some would not sell their clinics, but would pay for the software. The acquisition target had become the buyer. Owning the waiting room was no longer a prerequisite for improving what happened behind it.
That turn explains Flagler’s place in the market. It serves the practices where people already seek treatment, including orthopedics, interventional pain and physical therapy. Virtual-care companies such as Hinge Health and Sword Health approach much of the same territory through employers and health plans. Flagler’s customer is the clinic. Its opportunity begins with the clinic’s unfinished work.
One customer makes that work tangible. Freedom Integrated Healthcare in Arizona once maintained separate authorization teams for surgeries and routine procedures. After Flagler took on more of the process, business-development executive Sue Esho described consolidating the departments and moving staff into the clinic. The useful change was where people spent their time.
The most expensive button is another login
Flagler’s design promise is almost aggressively unshowy: stay inside the electronic medical record, or EMR. A busy physician does not have to become an enthusiastic user of another portal for the software to be useful. In a podcast interview, Katz compared recommendations in a patient’s record to reminders on a chart. They surface possibilities; the clinician retains the decision.
Bessemer describes a system that combines records, radiology reports, billing codes and physician practice patterns. That last detail matters. A tool operating inside a specialty practice must understand more than the words in a note. It must connect those words to the services, decisions and administrative steps that the practice can actually carry out.
- 01Find & routePatient identification and triage
- 02Reach & bookOutreach, intake and scheduling
- 03Authorize & billEligibility, claims and denials
- 04Follow & learnBetween-visit care and analytics
The founders cover those different demands. Katz brings practice operations and finance. Chief medical officer Dr. Leon Anijar is trained in interventional pain and anesthesiology. Chief technology officer Will Hu brings experience in machine learning for disease detection and progression, including work at IQVIA. Their backgrounds make the choice of market intelligible: this is a particular kind of clinic, with particular kinds of friction.
A visit ends. The care does not.
In January 2024, Katz wrote about a second discovery: helping a doctor choose treatment still left the question of what happened after the patient went home. His proposed “virtual vertical” connected a specialist practice to remote services while returning information to the patient’s record. The ambition was continuity without assembling every specialty under one expensive roof.
The current product range follows that expansion. Practices can adopt patient engagement, revenue cycle management, an AI call center, analytics, eFax referral handling and care management. They can begin with individual offerings. A clinic with an overloaded phone line may have a different starting point from one whose referrals arrive promptly but wait too long for scheduling.
For a patient, the benefit would be felt in ordinary moments: a call answered, a referral acted on, a follow-up between visits. For the practice, those moments also affect collections and capacity. Flagler’s proposition connects the care pathway to the business process that keeps it moving.
Figures reported by Flagler and its investors in 2026. Revenue uplift is not profit; patient reports do not establish a controlled treatment effect.
The price of finding out too late
Katz has also described a less flattering product lesson. His team spent two weeks building an add-on, then discovered that many customers already had a free equivalent. The proposed price was about $15 per patient per month. That figure belongs to the discarded feature, not Flagler’s current platform. The known cost was two weeks of work directed at a weak buying reason.
“We built it because it was the tool we needed to run our own practice better.”
Albert Katz, co-founder and CEO
There is something readers can copy here without copying the software: ask what a customer already uses, what it costs and why they would switch before writing the feature. For a practice evaluating Flagler, the same discipline means selecting a bottleneck and measuring it. Referral-to-booking time or denial rates offer more concrete starting points than a general appetite for AI.
Borrow the relationship, earn the contract
Distribution supplied another practical lesson. Katz has described early pilots with Abbott and Boston Scientific that opened introductions to other device companies and practices. These companies already knew the physicians Flagler wanted to reach. A recommendation tool could help a practice identify appropriate treatment candidates; a device partner could help Flagler reach the practice.
Flagler advertises performance-driven contracts, agreed targets and no upfront costs. That makes the baseline important: additional collections, administrative time and new service revenue are different measures. Any buyer should assess gains after fees and delivery costs. The model depends on workable record integration, appropriate clinical decisions and services that can be reimbursed. Poor data or an incompatible workflow would weaken it.
The August financing, led by Bessemer with SignalFire and other investors participating, funds expansion across American musculoskeletal practices. The wager is that a clinic’s capacity is constrained by everything required to turn medical judgment into completed care. Flagler found a business in that interval. Its next test is making the interval reliably shorter.