Company Bolsters Leadership Team to Accelerate Growth and Adoption of Agentic AI in Healthcare
SANTA BARBARA, Calif., – Artera.io, combining human and AI agent intelligence to fix patient communications, announced two key appointments to its executive leadership team: Damon Lanphear joins Artera as Chief Technology Officer (CTO), and Nicole Ossey has been promoted to Senior Vice President of People.
These leadership changes come at a pivotal moment for Artera, which recently secured a $65M growth investment to fuel the growth and adoption of agentic AI to fix patient communications. Lanphear will oversee Artera’s technical vision, and Ossey will lead the company’s talent, culture, and organizational scaling initiatives.
“We’re at an inflection point. Artera supports two billion patient communications a year, and AI Agents aren’t just changing how that work gets done. They’re expanding what’s possible and accelerating how quickly we can deliver – it’s unlike anything we’ve seen in a decade of doing this,” said Guillaume de Zwirek, CEO and Co-Founder, Artera. “Damon has already built what most are still trying to figure out – secure, AI-native healthcare products at 98point6, and startup speed at massive scale across three Amazon business units. Nicole joined us two years ago and has built the People organization we need to scale through our next phase – including the fundamental shift in how work gets done in the AI age. They round out the strongest leadership team we’ve ever had.”
Damon Lanphear Joins Artera as Chief Technology Officer
Lanphear brings more than 30 years of software development and executive leadership to Artera. He joins the company following a distinguished tenure at Amazon, where he led technology for three separate business units across Amazon – including Amazon Web Services (AWS) Snow, AWS Managed Services, and Amazon Devices – overseeing technical strategy for Kindle and Scribe devices.
A seasoned entrepreneur, Lanphear was the technical co-founder and CTO of 98point6, an early pioneer in AI-powered primary healthcare, which he guided from inception to nationwide operation. His deep expertise in building large-scale, AI-native, web, mobile, and digital multimedia services will be instrumental as Artera continues to evolve its agentic AI capabilities.
Nicole Ossey Promoted to Senior Vice President, People
Ossey’s promotion to SVP of People recognizes her significant impact on Artera’s organizational health and operational efficiency. With over 13 years of experience in the B2B SaaS sector, Ossey specializes in scaling People functions from the ground up and driving measurable results through strategic culture-building.
Prior to Artera, Ossey served as VP of People & Culture at Knock, where she was an integral part of the executive team that scaled the company from 30 to over 200 employees, ultimately leading to a major acquisition by RealPage. At Artera, she will continue to focus on creating an environment where high-performing talent can thrive as the company expands.
$65M Growth Investment Ignites AI-Driven Growth and Milestones
After unveiling Virtual Agent solutions at Artera’s Customer Conference Heartbeat’24 in September 2024, hundreds of healthcare providers have deployed Artera Agents, including AI Agents, Flows Agents, and Co-Pilots, to save millions of staff hours and fix patient access challenges. The company has recently achieved multiple agentic AI growth milestones, including:
- AI Co-Pilots: Deployed by over 100 healthcare providers, these solutions directly support staff by accelerating response times, reducing administrative burden with conversation summaries, and automating message shortening.
- Flows Agents – Deployed by hundreds of healthcare providers to successfully complete 94 percent of conversations without staff intervention,1 managing over 42 million unique sessions annually, and providing a clear, low-risk path toward increasingly sophisticated autonomous support2.
- healthsystemCIO Special AI report – Health System Leaders Developing the Frameworks to Let AI Flourish: Artera’s CEO and Co-Founder Guillaume de Zwirek, along with eight other industry experts from both health tech and healthcare organizations, were featured in this special report from healthsystemCIO, sharing perspectives on how healthcare leaders can begin to adopt AI.
- Educational Series – Decoding AI Agents for Healthcare: Designed to help healthcare providers navigate and evaluate the agentic AI market by breaking down critical agentic AI topics – from security frameworks like HITRUST to the innovative Model Context Protocol – to help providers make informed decisions and find the right agentic solutions for their organization.
Most recently, at HIMSS26, the Artera team showcased its real-world applications of AI for patient communications and access. The Artera booth served as a hub for agentic AI programming, featuring expert-led masterclasses and live demonstrations of AI Agents for communication and patient access workflows. From autonomous scheduling to intake, Artera demonstrated the measurable impact of AI on patient experience and staff efficiency.
