front-office-automation
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The Outlook Guys Found a $100 Million Problem Hiding in Your Doctor's Phone Queue
Pretty Good AI is betting that the useful future of healthcare AI is not a robot doctor. It is a tireless operator that answers on the first ring, knows the scheduling rules and puts the result in the right athenaOne field.
Shawn Shivdat
Shawn Shivdat is the co-founder and CEO of Penciled (YC W24), a San Francisco startup that builds an AI front office assistant for physical therapy clinics. Raised around a mother's private practice and trained in computational neuroscience at Harvard, he went from writing patient-outcome software at Massachusetts General Hospital to launching a company that fills canceled appointments and completes plans of care automatically. Penciled now serves 200+ providers across 50+ clinics and has raised over $2.6M.
Ryan Gallagher
Ryan Gallagher is a Stanford- and Harvard-trained physician turned founder who runs Clarion, the AI communication layer for healthcare. After helping build two breakout digital-health companies, Two Chairs and Ophelia, to $100M+ valuations, he started Clarion in 2024 to fix the unglamorous problem that swallows clinics whole: the phone. Clarion's AI agents answer the calls, texts and web chats that overwhelm front desks, handling scheduling, billing, refills and referrals end to end across 84+ EHR systems. Backed by Accel, Y Combinator and Sequoia scouts, the New York company already serves tens of thousands of patients a month.