Perspectives Health teaches AI to win the fight over insurance denials

Every night, while the treatment centers of America turn off their lights, a piece of software owned by a five-person company in Chicago starts reading. It pulls thousands of pages of patient charts - the assessments, the progress notes, the biopsychosocial histories - and looks for the small omissions that an insurance company will later use to refuse payment. By morning, it has emailed the clinicians a list of exactly what to fix. This is the daily work of Perspectives Health, and it is aimed at one of the least discussed failure points in American medicine: not the care itself, but the paperwork that proves the care happened.

Behavioral health - addiction treatment, mental health, the programs that sit at the front line of the overdose crisis - runs on documentation. A clinician can do everything right in a session and still watch the claim get denied because a note used the wrong phrasing, missed a required element, or didn't map cleanly to what a payer or accreditor expects. The denial is quiet. It shows up weeks later, and by then the program has already spent the money and the staff hours. Perspectives Health decided that gap was worth building a company around.

The problem nobody wants to touch

Co-founder and CEO Eshan Dosani frames the stakes in blunt terms drawn from his time working on drug policy in the White House before starting the company. "Drug overdose is the single biggest cause of death for young people in the US," he has said. The clinics fighting that crisis, in the founders' telling, spend roughly half their time and resources not on patients but on documentation, compliance, and audits. Every hour a counselor spends reformatting a chart to survive a utilization review is an hour not spent with someone in withdrawal.

That is the wedge. Perspectives Health, founded in 2024 and accepted into Y Combinator's Summer 2025 batch, builds a suite of AI agents that absorb the administrative load. The pitch is not "help the clinician type faster." It is "make sure the clinic gets paid, stays compliant, and keeps its doors open."

How the machine works

The product does four things, and they map neatly onto the life of a claim. It writes, it checks, it packages, and it defends. Rather than sell a single "scribe," Perspectives strings these agents along the documentation pipeline so a chart is being watched from the first note to the final audit.

The connective tissue is language. Compliance writing for accreditors like JCAHO and CARF, and for the payers who ultimately sign the checks, reads like a dialect - specific, unforgiving, and unrelated to how a clinician naturally describes a session. Perspectives trains its agents to translate between the two, so a note that reads well for the patient's file also reads well for the reviewer who decides if it gets funded. The system connects through a Chrome extension and integrations with existing tools, including the behavioral health EMR BestNotes, rather than asking clinics to rip out what they already use.

There is a quiet design choice in that overnight cadence. Auditing charts in real time, while a clinician is mid-shift, would mean interrupting the person you are trying to help. Doing it after hours means the software works against a full, settled record and hands back a tidy morning to-do list instead of a stream of pop-ups. It is the difference between a colleague who nags and one who leaves a sticky note. For a workforce already prone to burnout, that distinction matters more than it looks on a feature comparison.

Not another scribe

The obvious comparison is the crowd of ambient AI scribes - Abridge, Nabla, Suki, DeepScribe - that record a visit and generate a note. That market is real and getting loud. Perspectives Health made a deliberate choice to look past it. Transcription is upstream; the money is downstream, in the denial, the audit, and the utilization review. A note is only valuable if the claim attached to it survives. By anchoring on revenue-cycle and compliance work instead of dictation, the company competes less with the general scribes and more with behavioral-health-specific players like Eleos Health, while planting itself in the part of the workflow that clinics feel in their bank accounts.

That positioning also explains the early traction. When a product is tied directly to dollars a clinic is currently losing, the sales conversation is short. The company reports reaching $250,000 in committed annual recurring revenue within four weeks of launch, with a dozen-plus programs - names like Sana Lake, Fortitude, New Dawn, HYGEA, Defining Wellness, and Reflections - in the mix, plus a larger enterprise system. Numbers this early are self-reported and should be read as a signal of demand rather than a settled financial picture, but the direction is telling: clinics were waiting for someone to solve exactly this.

Who is actually buying

The customer is not a hospital procurement committee. It is a residential addiction program, an outpatient mental health clinic, an intensive-outpatient provider - organizations that often run lean back offices and feel every denied claim personally. Public materials list a dozen-plus programs using or piloting the platform, among them Sana Lake, Fortitude, New Dawn, Living and Balance, HYGEA, Defining Wellness, Reflections, and Summit Estate, alongside a larger enterprise system. These are exactly the operators for whom a rejected claim is not a line item but a payroll question. When the pain is that concrete, the buyer does not need to be sold on the category; they need to be shown that the software actually catches what a human reviewer would miss at 9 p.m.

That is also why the compliance credentials are not a footnote. No behavioral health program is going to let an outside system read its most sensitive records - substance use and mental health histories are among the most protected data in American law - without hard assurances. The company's statement that it is HIPAA and SOC 2 compliant, third-party audited, is less a marketing badge than the entry ticket that makes the rest of the product legal to run.

The people and the model

Perspectives Health is a two-founder company at its core. Dosani, a University of Chicago graduate, handles the go-to-market and the mission framing; his co-founder and CTO, Kyle Hyun Woo Jung, handles the engineering. The team is small - five to seven people - and hiring senior engineers out of Chicago. The business is straightforward B2B SaaS: recurring software sold to behavioral health and addiction programs, priced against the value of the denials it prevents and the clinician hours it returns. There is no consumer app, no marketplace, no attempt to be everything. The company states it is HIPAA and SOC 2 compliant, third-party audited - table stakes for touching protected health information, and a prerequisite for any clinic to let software read its charts at all.

The origin story helps explain the shape of the product. Dosani came to the problem through policy, where the failure of the system is measured in overdose deaths and closed programs; Jung came through engineering, where the failure is measured in brittle integrations and hallucinated output. The company they built sits at that seam. It is less interested in the flashiest demo than in the question a clinic administrator asks after the demo ends: will this get my claims paid, and will it not create a new mess I have to clean up? So far, the answer the market is giving is a cautious yes.

Where it fits

Healthcare AI in 2025 and 2026 has largely chased the big, visible targets - the hospital system, the radiology read, the general-purpose scribe. Perspectives Health went the other way, toward a market that is smaller, more fragmented, and more desperate. Behavioral health programs operate on thin margins and get squeezed hardest by denials, which makes them both the toughest customers and the ones with the clearest reason to buy. If the company is right that half of a clinic's operational load is administrative, then automating even a slice of it changes the economics of running a program - and, by extension, how many patients a program can afford to treat.

The risks are the usual ones for a young company in a regulated space: incumbents can add features, EMRs can wall off integrations, and self-reported traction has to convert into durable contracts. But the thesis is clean and, importantly, unglamorous in a way that tends to survive hype cycles. Perspectives Health is not promising to replace the therapist. It is promising to make sure the therapist gets paid for the work they already did - and to do it overnight, before anyone at the clinic has had their coffee.