Assort Health Alternatives for Orthopedic Practices (2026 Comparison)

By Comron Saifi, MD

If your orthopedic practice is evaluating AI for the phones, you have probably come across Assort Health. They are the best-funded company focused on this problem, they have real, named orthopedic customers, and they've published results that got the industry's attention.

Full disclosure up front: I'm a spine surgeon and the co-founder of ClinicFlow, which appears in this comparison. I have an obvious interest here. I'm writing this anyway because most "alternatives" articles are written by marketing teams that have never taken surgical call, and the honest answer to "which one should we pick?" genuinely depends on what kind of practice you run.

The short version

• Large multi-site group or MSO (25+ providers), patient-access focus: Assort Health is a credible default, and EliseAI is a well-capitalized contender.
• Independent surgical practice (1 to 15 providers) that needs clinical call handling, not just scheduling: this is the gap most platforms leave behind, and it's exactly where ClinicFlow lives.
• Multi-specialty or non-surgical clinic that wants broad omnichannel messaging: Hello Patient and Confido Health are worth a look.

Assort Health: what they do well, and what to probe

Assort built its early reputation in orthopedics and has the strongest public ortho proof in the category: named customers like Michigan Orthopedic Surgeons and Peninsula Orthopaedic Associates, with published metrics on hold times and recovered revenue. They integrate with major EMRs, maintain a dedicated orthopedic product page, and in 2025 raised $102M to expand well beyond orthopedics into 20+ specialties, FQHCs, and health systems.

If you run a large group, they belong on your shortlist. Questions worth asking in the demo, based on what their public materials emphasize and what they don't:

1. After-hours clinical calls. Their public materials center on patient access: scheduling, intake, hold times, outreach. If a post-op patient calls at 11 p.m. with a clinical concern, what exactly happens, and how does the on-call surgeon find out?
2. Practice-size fit. Their published case studies and enterprise sales motion center on large organizations. If you run a 5-surgeon group, ask what their typical customer your size looks like, what the minimums are, and how implementation is staffed.
3. Specialty focus over time. Orthopedics was their wedge; today it's one of 20+ specialties they serve. Ask how much of their roadmap is ortho-specific.

None of these are criticisms of the product. They're fit questions, and good vendors answer them directly.

ClinicFlow: built by surgeons for surgical practices

ClinicFlow is the specialist option in this list, and the one I co-founded. The premise: in a surgical practice the phones are a clinical system, not just a scheduling system, so the product is designed around the calls that carry risk and revenue, not just volume.

What that means concretely:

• Every call answered 24/7, booked, rescheduled, or resolved directly, in 28 languages.
• Urgent after-hours clinical calls reach the on-call surgeon by text with a secure link to a structured summary, in minutes. This is the workflow most patient-access platforms simply don't have.
• Non-urgent clinical calls become summaries in EMR messaging, waiting for the care team in the morning.
• Surgical-practice specifics built in: workers' comp intake, injection and global-period scheduling logic, referral capture, and (rolling out) automated referral fax-to-appointment, pre-op and post-op protocol calls, and prior authorization automation.
• Sized for independent practices. ClinicFlow is built for 1-15 provider surgical groups, the segment enterprise platforms are structurally priced past. Partner practices report up to 70% lower phone operational costs and 20% more surgical revenue.

The honest tradeoffs: we are earlier-stage than Assort or EliseAI, we are deliberately narrow (orthopedics, spine, and surgical specialties, not 20 verticals), and if you need a health-system-wide omnichannel platform, we are not that.

You don't have to take any of this on faith: our agent is on a public line you can call like a patient at clinicflowai.com/demo.

EliseAI: enterprise scale, new to orthopedics

EliseAI is the largest company on this list ($2.2B valuation, $200M ARR across its businesses). It built its revenue base in property management AI and has been expanding into healthcare, with published results in dermatology and women's health and a stated focus that now includes orthopedics.

Strengths: serious capital, mature voice technology, an athenahealth Marketplace listing, and strong published metrics in its core healthcare specialties. The fit questions for an ortho group: their healthcare proof so far is dermatology and OB/GYN rather than surgical practices, their sales motion is enterprise (multi-site groups, custom implementations), and their workflows center on access and front-desk automation rather than clinical call triage.

Hello Patient: omnichannel breadth, founder-led velocity

Hello Patient (founded by an ex-Carbon Health product leader) sells "Mia," an AI assistant spanning voice, text, and chat, with 13+ practice-management integrations. They publish strong results in urgent care and digital health, and they market a templated orthopedics page.

Strengths: omnichannel coverage in one product, fast-moving team, modern voice stack. Fit questions: no named orthopedic customers in their public materials, no urgent clinical escalation workflow described, and a breadth strategy (8+ specialties including veterinary and med spas) that means ortho-specific depth will always compete with other verticals for their roadmap.

Confido Health: multi-specialty automation with a channel motion

Confido positions AI "digital workers" across many outpatient specialties, with published customers in nephrology, dental, and community health. They integrate with common ambulatory EMRs including ModMed, which matters in orthopedics.

Strengths: broad back-office automation ambitions beyond the phones, ModMed marketplace presence. Fit questions: their named customers and case studies are outside orthopedics, pricing is opaque, and like the other horizontal platforms, there's no published urgent-clinical-call workflow.

How to run the evaluation

Whatever you choose, make every vendor answer the same 3 calls (I walk through the full framework in our AI receptionist buyer's guide):

1. The Saturday 9 p.m. post-op call with a clinical concern.
2. The workers' comp intake with a missing claim number.
3. The referral that arrived while the desk was slammed.

Then put your own numbers into a calculator (ours is at clinicflowai.com/missed-call-calculator) and weigh the quote against what the missed calls are already costing you.

If you run a large multi-site platform, Assort and EliseAI have earned their place in your process. If you run an independent surgical practice and the calls that worry you are clinical, that's the problem ClinicFlow was built for, by people who take call themselves.