SAN FRANCISCO, AUGUST 4, 2026 — Assort Health, the leading AI agents platform for the entire patient journey, today named Sunny Eappen, MD, MBA, as its first Chief Medical Officer, bringing decades of clinical leadership to guide the development of AI agents that safely navigate complex patient needs and care pathways.
Health systems face growing demand for care, yet access is constrained by staffing and fragmented administrative processes. Patients and staff navigate scheduling, referrals, care gap closure, and other administrative work that prevent patients from progressing in their care journey despite latent capacity. As Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Eappen will help Assort address these barriers by bringing clinical and operational expertise to the company’s work with large healthcare organizations.
Dr. Eappen brings more than three decades of experience across clinical care, hospital operations, and health system leadership, from practicing anesthesiology to serving as a hospital chief medical officer and, most recently, President and CEO of a multi-state rural health network. In his new role, he will help guide how Assort builds and deploys AI for large health systems, with a focus on expanding access, making better use of limited clinical capacity, and ensuring the platform reflects the realities of how health systems operate.
“Nearly every health system is trying to solve the same fundamental problem: how to connect patients to the right provider without unnecessary friction. I’ve spent much of my career trying to solve this problem from inside health systems,” said Dr. Sunny Eappen. “We have more patients who need care than our workforce can serve, which means we must use the current breakthroughs in AI to solve these problems right now. I joined Assort because its platform can learn across organizations and specialties in a way no individual health system can replicate on its own. Assort creates an extraordinary opportunity to expand access by overcoming the obstacles that patients, staff, and clinicians currently face in connecting patients and their caregivers.”
“Dr. Eappen has spent his career leading the kinds of organizations we’re building for,” said Jon Wang, Founder and Co-CEO of Assort Health. “He’s experienced firsthand the operational complexity behind every patient interaction, from scheduling and referrals to capacity planning and care delivery. He knows AI only matters if it helps health systems see more patients without creating more work for the people delivering care. His clinical judgment and operating experience will shape how we build.”
Assort’s platform coordinates patient-facing workflows across scheduling, referrals, care gap closure, document processing, medication refills, payments, and more. Underlying the platform are more than 62,000 care protocols, 1.6 million decision pathways, and 200 million specialty patient interactions that capture the complexity of provider preferences, subspecialty routing rules, payer billing requirements, and other operational logic that govern patient access.
These protocols are automatically built and continuously refined through Assort’s Synapse engine, then tailored by Assort’s implementation team to each organization’s workflows, accelerating deployment while incorporating operational best practices learned across hundreds of deployments.
“The hardest part of building AI for health systems is not automating a task. It’s understanding how decisions made in one part of the organization affect whether a patient reaches the right clinician and whether that clinician’s time is used well,” said Jeffery Liu, Founder and Co-CEO of Assort Health. "Dr. Eappen brings that whole-system perspective in-house because he’s had to navigate tradeoffs across an entire health system. He’ll help us evaluate critical clinical workflows and care protocols so that we can build around the realities of delivering care, rather than asking health systems to reorganize around AI, while enabling Assort to tackle more clinically sophisticated challenges over time.”
Dr. Eappen most recently served as President and CEO of University of Vermont Health, a six-hospital rural academic health system with roughly 14,000 employees serving one million patients across Vermont and northern New York. In this role, he oversaw operations for the system’s academic medical center, two community hospitals, three critical access hospitals, a children’s hospital, and home health and hospice services.
Previously, Dr. Eappen served as Chief Medical Officer and Senior Vice President of Medical Affairs at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and as Chief Medical Officer and Chair of Anesthesiology at Massachusetts Eye and Ear. He completed his anesthesiology residency at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, his MD at the University of Chicago, and his MBA at Yale. He is a special advisor in Anesthesiology at Mass General Brigham and remains a Clinical Professor of Anesthesiology at the University of Vermont’s Larner College of Medicine.
Expanding Assort’s Health System Leadership
Dr. Eappen’s appointment continues Assort’s investment in building the leadership team and expertise required to support health systems adopting AI across the patient journey.
Imaad Rashied, Vice President of Health Systems, leads Assort’s health systems business and brings more than 15 years of experience building and scaling health system operations businesses, including leading AI product commercialization at Qventus and holding leadership positions at Clockwise.MD and BluCheck Healthcare. Together with Dr. Eappen, he works closely with health system executives to identify where AI can expand access, improve clinical capacity, and support sustainable operational change.
Assort has also expanded its health systems team to include Area Vice Presidents Mitch Anderson, Michael Gaines, Alex Huber, Randy Kosmalski, and Jake Puckett. Together, these leaders bring six decades of experience working with specialty groups and large health systems to adopt technology, build lasting partnerships, and achieve measurable results. In addition to new members of the health systems team, Assort Health welcomes Marie D’Aiuto as Patient Access Consultant. D’Aiuto brings years of experience supporting orthopedic patients and helping healthcare organizations transform patient access.
For more information, visit assorthealth.com.
