New York City-based behavioral health technology company Ease Health has just emerged from stealth with $41 million in fresh capital from its Series A round.
The new artificial intelligence-infused operating system aims to reduce fragmentation by unifying electronic health records (EHR), revenue cycle management (RCM), and customer relationship management (CRM) systems into a single platform, thereby eliminating workflow silos.
Ease Health’s platform can reportedly offer providers 60-70% faster documentation and since clinicians can complete tasks more quickly, the time savings directly translate to a return on investment that adds between 30-40% more clinical sessions on their calendars to see additional patients, Zach Cohen, the company’s co-founder and CEO, told Behavioral Health Business. The tool has also shown it can reduce intake and admission team labor costs by 50%.
Steve Gold, the company’s other co-founder and president previously founded and led Refresh Mental Health before it was acquired by UnitedHealth Group’s Optum in 2022.
“We have people using our systems now and we’re getting feedback, but the hope is in three to four months, we can sit down with our CFO and see all the actual changes and impact through empirical data,” Cohen said. “We’re hearing anecdotally that they don’t need 20 people to update Salesforce or 40 billers to bill manually through the mail. This way, you can have people focus on growth versus retroactively trying to collect from payers and things like that.”
Historically, behavioral health providers have navigated between six or more separate systems for these functionalities, so reducing patchwork tools and redundant processes was one of Ease Health’s central priorities. Other unified platforms like this do exist, but what sets Ease apart from its competitors is that it started after AI’s emergence, which has fundamentally shaped how Ease built its platform, Cohen explained.
“We built a unified system in a very different way, knowing where we wanted our system to start and end, and then also knowing what AI can do, how AI flourishes in the sense of where our data flows, how it flows, all of that,” Cohen said. “That is fundamentally very different … they couldn’t have had the foresight that people wanted CRM or wanted AI in their EHRs and now they’re having to plug it back in, where we have the benefit of this infinite campus.”
The company plans to use the funding to expand its product and engineering teams, integrate additional AI functionalities throughout the platform to reduce manual work within billing and utilization tasks like prior authorizations, utilization review, auditing and manually submitting or correcting claims by 40-50%, which could lead to increased profit margins as well, Cohen said. Those features are currently under development and will launch over the next three to six months.
“We’re really just trying to help an industry that has often been ignored by technology,” he added.
A portion of the $41 million will also be used to support continued plans to upscale and eventually expand into other behavioral health segments, such as intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) and applied behavioral analysis (ABA) with future capabilities. Longer term, the company may expand into other ambulatory markets, but for now, the team will be “hell-bent on a behavioral health focus,” Cohen said.
“In behavioral health, we want to touch more of the IDD and ABA space, which we don’t touch today,” Cohen said. “We’re really excited about that space. The technology is bogging people down. We just had a company that had about an eight-to-nine-hour intake for a patient with their BCBA. So we’re excited about that in the midterm future.”
Additional capabilities for IDD and autism services are likely to come to fruition within the next two years, Cohen said.
Andreessen Horowitz led Ease Health’s Series A investment round. The venture capital firm previously backed Pomelo Care’s digital maternal health platform.
