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GrokPLANO, Texas, Oct. 28, 2026 — The patients who most need a sleep specialist are often the ones staring at the ceiling at 2 a.m., waking up gasping for air or lying beside a snoring partner and finally ready to get help. To ensure those patients never hit a dead-end voicemail again, Dallas Sleep, one of North Texas’s premier sleep medicine practices, has deployed Steer Health’s agentic AI across all of its offices, giving patients a unified, 24/7 digital front door integrated directly with athenaOne.
Unlike legacy healthcare chatbots that merely recite FAQs or take messages, Steer Health’s FastTrackCare platform completes the entire intake workflow across voice, text, web chat and the practice website. When a patient calls or messages Dallas Sleep at 11 p.m., Steer’s AI voice agent answers clinical prep and location questions in natural conversation, checks insurance eligibility, applies Dr. Raj Kakar’s provider-specific scheduling rules and books the appointment directly into the practice’s live athenaOne schedule.
For Dr. Rajdeep "Raj" Kakar, MD, MPH, a Stanford-trained, board-certified internal and sleep medicine specialist who has led Dallas Sleep since 2006, capturing that midnight call is a clinical imperative. Because untreated sleep apnea drives severe cardiovascular and metabolic risks, every patient lost to a hold queue or overnight voicemail represents a missed opportunity to intervene.
"Sleep problems don't keep office hours, and our patients shouldn't have to either," Dr. Kakar said. "When someone finally decides to get help at 2 a.m., that is the moment that matters. At the same time, I want our talented front-desk staff caring for the patients standing in front of them, not repeating our address, hours and sleep-study prep instructions 40 times a day. Steer Health gives our team that time back while making sure every patient gets a real answer and a confirmed appointment, no matter when they reach out."
Specialty practices face uniquely complex front-office bottlenecks, juggling referrals from primary care doctors, cardiologists and dentists alongside intricate rules for in-lab versus home sleep testing. Nationally, specialty clinics average an 81% schedule fill rate and 18% to 20% no-show rates as overwhelmed front desks struggle to keep up.
By deploying Steer Health, a certified athenaOne solution on the athenahealth Marketplace, Dallas Sleep automates its highest-friction administrative touchpoints without requiring staff to learn a new software system:
- 24/7 Bidirectional athenaOne AI Scheduling: Reads live provider availability, visit types and scheduling templates directly from athenaOne and writes confirmed appointments, patient demographics and intake details back into the EHR with zero manual re-keying or double-booking.
- Omnichannel Continuity & Automated Eligibility: Allows patients to start a conversation via web chat or text and finish by phone without repeating themselves, while verifying insurance coverage before the day of the visit.
- Proactive Patient Recall: Beyond inbound calls, Dallas Sleep and Steer Health are launching automated outbound outreach to re-engage patients who were referred but never scheduled, left a sleep study incomplete or drifted away from CPAP therapy.
- Proven Operational ROI: Across its national customer base of 109 healthcare organizations and 472 locations, Steer Health’s agentic AI has driven a 76% reduction in repetitive staff tasks, pushed schedule utilization to 98% and reduced no-show rates to as low as 2.2%.
"Dr. Kakar has spent two decades making specialty sleep care easier to reach across North Texas, and his team lives that mission every day," said Sridhar Yerramreddy, founder and CEO of Steer Health. "We built Steer Health so a busy specialty practice like Dallas Sleep can stay open to every patient at every hour without burning out the staff who make care possible. Agentic AI should take repetitive work off a care team's plate, fill open clinical capacity and bring lost patients back into treatment, all inside the EHR workflow they already trust."
Clinical questions and complex care needs outside Dallas Sleep’s established protocols are routed directly to Dr. Kakar’s clinical team, ensuring the AI handles administrative execution while human clinicians manage patient care.
About Dallas Sleep
Dallas Sleep, also known as the Dallas Center for Sleep Disorders, is a multi-office sleep medicine practice led by Dr. Raj Kakar, MD, MPH, a Stanford-fellowship-trained, board-certified internal and sleep medicine physician and Fellow of the American College of Physicians recognized among D Magazine’s Best Doctors in Dallas. With locations across the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex, including Plano and McKinney, Dallas Sleep diagnoses and treats sleep apnea, snoring, insomnia, chronic fatigue and pediatric sleep disorders through in-lab and home sleep testing, CPAP and BiPAP therapy, and affordable cash-pay care options. The practice runs on athenaOne. Learn more at dallas-sleep.com.
About Steer Health
Steer Health is the AI-native growth and operational automation platform for healthcare providers. Its FastTrackCare platform captures patient demand across voice, web, text, chat and referrals, verifies benefits and books patients directly into 36 leading EHR systems, including athenaOne, Epic, Oracle Health and MEDITECH, to keep schedules full around the clock. Headquartered in Irving, Texas, and a member of the Coalition for Health AI (CHAI), Steer Health serves 109 healthcare organizations across 472 locations, including more than 60 hospitals covering roughly 19 million patient lives. Steer Health is the winner of the 2026 Hearst Health Prize and a recognized KLAS Emerging Solutions Top 20 company.
