ActiumHealth is a company that scales human connection with leading enterprise-scale AI agents for patient calls, outreach, and insights. Pulse 2.0 interviewed ActiumHealth COO Carter Dunn to gain a deeper understanding of the company.
Carter Dunn’s Background
What is Carter Dunn’s background? Dunn has spent most of his career at the intersection of technology and healthcare. At Google, he led teams that developed state-of-the-art AI tools to identify disease in medical images. At Amazon, he led the direct-to-consumer business for Amazon Care. Now, he has set his sights on patient communication and engagement as the Chief Operating Officer of ActiumHealth, which develops AI agents to help provider organizations scale their patient interactions with calls, outreach, and insights. It is the leader in the space, having automated over 50 million calls and 100 million outreach messages with AI.
Formation Of The Company
How did the idea for the company come together? Dunn said:
“When we launched in 2017, the healthcare AI landscape looked very different. We began by building what seemed logical at the time, a website chatbot for a health system partner. After deployment, we encountered an unexpected problem: virtually no patient engagement.”
“The analytics were working perfectly; patients simply weren’t visiting the website. When we asked our customer how patients preferred to communicate, the answer was immediate: ‘The phone. We have hundreds of staff members handling calls across our hospitals and practices every day.’”
“That insight fundamentally shifted our approach. We realized the future wasn’t in web-based chatbots. It was in voice-first AI agents that could meet patients where they already were: on the phone. That pivot led us to pioneer the AI Agent Patient Communication category, transforming how healthcare organizations handle the billions of calls patients make annually.”
“Today, we are the largest AI-powered patient communication platform. Leading healthcare organizations such as Houston Methodist, MemorialCare and Virtua Health have automated over 50 million calls and 100 million outreach messages with ActiumHealth across 6 languages.”
Core Products
What are the company’s core products and features? Dunn explained:
“Actium Health is the leading AI-powered patient communication platform. Actium enables healthcare organizations to scale patient engagement, reduce staff burnout, and improve patient access—all while preserving the feel of human connection and delivering measurable ROI.”
“There are three main tools we offer to help our customers across all channels, including phone, SMS, and yes, still chat.
Inbound: Frees up staff time by automating inbound calls for department transfers, scheduling, appointment management, and prescription refills.
Outbound: Closes care gaps and increases appointment bookings by automatically calling patients to schedule open orders, reduce no shows, and follow up on unpaid bills.
Insights: Reduces business risk and improves patient experience by moving from <1% of calls QA’d to 100% QA’d against your existing rubrics.
Our AI agents create efficiencies that allow their human counterparts to concentrate on cases that need their expertise, alleviating the burden of a heavy workload caused by high volume of routine calls. We help create 60-100+ FTE of additional capacity, adding $20 million in appointment revenue, and QA up to 100% of staff-patient interactions.”
Favorite Memory
What has been your favorite memory working for the company so far? Dunn reflected:
“A recent favorite was sharing with our customer a call that someone had made to one of their hospitals. The caller was an older woman who was trying to reach a neighbor who had been admitted to the hospital to have a baby. The caller wasn’t quite sure where she needed to go, there was lots of background noise and interruptions, and throughout the process, ActiumHealth’s AI Agent was patient and kind as it got her to the right place.”
“Looking around the room at the smiles and nods from our customers – all Directors, VPs, SVPs – what struck us all wasn’t just the technical precision, but the empathy of the interaction. The caller was genuinely grateful for the patience and competence that the AI agent exhibited. It reinforced that our technology isn’t just about efficiency. It is also about upholding the caring, personal touch that defines healthcare, even as we scale it through AI.”
Challenges Faced
What challenges has Dunn and the team faced in building the company? Dunn acknowledged:
“Two main challenges are technology and inertia, which is funny because one is moving at a breakneck pace and the other is molasses.”
“Technology is advancing rapidly. We address this by building smaller, iterative products that allow us to rapidly develop expertise while delivering immediate customer value. As an example, we took a very methodical approach to building large language models (LLMs) into our products. We started with offline analytics, progressed to simple call transfers for hospitals, and now handle complex EMR-connected live interactions across all care settings.”
“We also deal with inertia. Despite all the advancements and opportunities, health systems are still large organizations that often lack the ability to implement solutions quickly, even when the benefits are clear. It can be tempting to use caution when things are moving at lightning speed. But that’s actually when you need to start engaging, building small and learning. For your readers familiar with agile product development, the idea is similar but from the perspective of a buyer of technology: by engaging early and making a series of increasingly larger investments, health systems reduce the risk of making bigger and less informed decisions after their peers are already ahead.”
“The best examples of this come from our clients. One great story is that of Nebraska Medicine, below.”
Evolution Of The Company’s Technology
How has the company’s technology evolved since its launch? Dunn noted:
“The transformation has been dramatic. We began with traditional natural language processing (NLP) and intent-driven bots — essentially sophisticated decision trees. Today, we operate fully conversational AI agents built on leading foundation models, delivering true omnichannel patient experiences across inbound, outbound, and insights.”
“Our agents understand context, maintain conversation flow across multiple touchpoints, and provide insights that help healthcare organizations optimize their entire patient communication strategy. We’ve evolved from simple automation to intelligent, adaptive communication partners. For patients, that translates to an interaction that feels authentic. If you want to check it out, we have a great live demo online at actiumhealth.com.”
Significant Milestones
What have been some of the company’s most significant milestones? Dunn cited:
“We recently surpassed 50 million automated calls, making us the largest player in healthcare AI patient communication by approximately 10x. The way we look at that number, that is 50 million moments where patients got faster, more consistent access to care in their language of choice while staff could focus on more complex, high-touch interactions.”
“More recently, we demonstrated our AI agents can QA calls as accurately as a contact center manager. This has allowed our customers to reduce business risk and improve patient experience by moving from <1% of calls QA’d to 100% QA’d against their existing rubrics.”
“We are also honored to have been recognized with a HLTH Digital Health Hub award in 2024 for Best Healthcare Savings Story and by Frost & Sullivan for Best Practices in Conversational AI.”
Customer Success Stories
When asking Dunn about customer success stories, he highlighted:
“The University of Nebraska Medicine’s contact center was managing 2.5 million annual calls across its system. High call volume and routine inquiries began to overwhelm staff and trigger delays in patient access, leaving less time for critical work like managing transplant coordination. Leadership needed a scalable, efficient solution without compromising care quality.”
“Nebraska Medicine partnered with ActiumHealth to deploy AI-powered virtual agents for intelligent call routing, and to handle routine tasks such as directory assistance and general inquiries. As a designated “Delta Project”— one of Nebraska Medicine’s top strategic priorities — this initiative started with routine call handling, and will soon be followed by Epic integration for scheduling and medication refills.”
“The success of this partnership has been driven by a phased approach, tight alignment with Nebraska Medicine’s IT team, and a bold vision: start with high-volume, low-complexity calls and scale strategically.”
“Nebraska Medicine recently shared these results with the National Association of Healthcare Access Management:
— 70% of calls routed by AI Agents
— There is a 0-second wait time for those calls, creating a better patient experience
— 40% reduction in abandoned calls
— Nebraska Medicine’s contact center agents are now freed up for complex, high-value patient interactions. The reduced call volume has also eased team stress and burnout
— Patients now have 24/7 multilingual and omnichannel access
Next month, another client, Houston Methodist, will be sharing their experience with the Scottsdale Institute. Stay tuned.”
Funding
When asking Dunn about the company’s funding details, he revealed:
“We’re backed by exceptional investors who understand both healthcare and AI at scale. We’ve raised nearly $100 million from leading firms including Oak HC/FT, TCV, Google Ventures, NEA, and Section 32.”
Total Addressable Market
What total addressable market (TAM) size is the company pursuing? Dunn assessed:
“The healthcare communication market represents a big opportunity for health systems to deploy AI Agents. From what we’ve seen working with customers, there are roughly 12 calls for every hospital admission and 3 calls for every ambulatory visit. With 34M hospital admissions and 1B ambulatory visits in the U.S, every year, that’s 3.4B calls a year. And that’s just inbound – the opportunity for proactive outreach is on the same scale.”
“The excitement from investors and the influx of new companies getting seed funding reflects the promise of what’s ahead. We’re not just improving existing processes; we’re enabling entirely new levels of patient access and engagement that weren’t previously possible.”
Differentiation From The Competition
What differentiates the company from its competition? Dunn affirmed:
“ActiumHealth is a complete platform. We provide a single platform for AI–powered patient communication across inbound, outbound, and insights. This ensures that our health system clients don’t have to bolt together multiple point solutions to meet the needs of patients and staff.”
“We’re proven at scale. With 50 million calls and 100 million messages automated, ActiumHealth is the most significant player in the market, with a platform purpose-built for healthcare. We have demonstrated success across all care settings while avoiding common implementation pitfalls.”
“ActiumHealth is built on a flexible, open platform. Our platform is built on open architecture, enabling rapid adoption of the latest advances in LLMs, speech-to-text, and text-to-speech. We’re not locked into proprietary solutions, which gives our customers flexibility and future-proofs their investment.”
“The technology is multimodal. Our unified AI agents operate consistently across voice, SMS, and chat, reducing deployment time while creating seamless patient experiences regardless of communication preference.”
Future Goals
What are some of the company’s future goals? Dunn emphasized:
“While we are excited about continuing to grow our customer base, I’m particularly engaged in our efforts to expand support for existing customers as their needs evolve. Our customers often come to us with specific pain points – whether that’s improving the quality of staff interactions with patients, handling inbound calls, or conducting proactive patient outreach. What makes our platform unique is that we can address all these use cases on a single, integrated system. We want to make sure all our customers are doing everything that they can to help scale patient communication across their enterprise.”
Additional Thoughts
Any other topics you would like to discuss? Dunn concluded:
“For healthcare leaders considering AI adoption, my advice is to start with clear high volume, low complexity use cases to show your organization quick wins. Choose partners with demonstrated healthcare expertise at scale. The technology is ready and it works; now it’s time for healthcare organizations to ready themselves for a paradigm shift that will better serve their patients and staff.”
