Steer Health Wins 2026 Hearst Health Prize

DALLAS, Texas — September 2026 — Steer Health, the agentic AI operating platform for healthcare operations, has been named the winner of the 2026 Hearst Health Prize, an annual award presented in partnership with the UCLA Center for SMART Health to recognize data-science programs making a measurable impact on health outcomes.¹

The recognition reflects a problem Steer Health was created to solve: healthcare organizations capture extensive information about patients and care, but the operational work between recorded events can still break down. A referral is entered but never becomes an appointment. A patient receives a care plan but does not complete the next step. A cancellation opens a slot, but the right patient is never reached in time to fill it.

In a new interview with Hearst, Steer Health Founder and CEO Sridhar Yerramreddy describes these failures as more than a staffing challenge. They are a data and orchestration challenge—one that requires healthcare organizations to identify where a patient is at risk of falling out of care and complete the next appropriate action before the gap becomes an adverse outcome or lost opportunity.¹

“What often gets lost in healthcare is everything before and after the appointment,” Yerramreddy told Hearst. “Doctors do all they can, but their focus is the visit itself—and that’s exactly the gap we exist to fill.”¹

The EHR Is the System of Record. Steer Health Is the System of Action.

Electronic health records remain essential systems of record. They store the referral, appointment, clinical note, care plan and claim. But storing an event is different from completing the operational work around it.

Steer Health works alongside the EHR as a system of action. Its specialized AI agents use shared patient context to complete multi-step workflows across patient access, scheduling, eligibility, clinical documentation, care coordination and revenue operations. Each action is written back to the organization’s existing systems, while exceptions requiring clinical judgment, empathy or complex decision-making are escalated to staff.

This distinction is central to agentic AI. A chatbot may answer a question. An isolated automation may send a reminder. An agentic platform determines the next required action, completes it in the appropriate system, carries the context forward and initiates the next step.

On Steer Health, an inquiry can become an appropriately booked appointment. The booking context can carry into the visit. The encounter can produce structured documentation and an actionable care plan. The care plan can initiate follow-up, while the resulting activity is returned to the EHR. The objective is not more AI activity; it is completed work.

One patient thread. Specialized agents. Completed work.

From Broad Outreach to Individual Action

Traditional patient-engagement operations often rely on large worklists and standardized outreach. Staff call patients sequentially, even though each person's likelihood of responding—and the support required to keep that person connected to care—may be different.

Steer Health applies data science to make this work more precise. The platform can use approved scheduling context, engagement history and communication preferences to identify patients who may need additional support. It can then act through the patient's preferred channel and language, offer a more appropriate appointment option, simplify approved instructions, coordinate follow-up or escalate an exception to the care team.

The approach is designed to help staff manage exceptions and relationships rather than spend limited time processing repetitive volume. It also extends the clinician's plan beyond the visit without replacing clinical judgment.

As Yerramreddy explained in the Hearst interview, the purpose is to help patients feel empowered rather than processed.¹

Outcomes in Production

Steer Health's position is grounded in operating results, not only a technology thesis. The company now serves more than 21 million patients across 42 states. It has delivered more than 4 million automated follow-ups, and customers have reported no-show rates around 2.2%, compared with the 18% industry figure cited in the Hearst interview. The platform operates across more than 470 locations and integrates with more than 50 EHR systems.¹

Named customer deployments provide additional evidence of what connected patient operations can produce.

At Saint Mary's Health Network, Steer Health supported a coordinated patient-access model spanning online scheduling and rescheduling, automated reminders, digital intake, after-hours support, referrals and follow-up. Over six months, Saint Mary's reduced its no-show rate from 22% to 5.2%, completed more than 2,894 digital appointments, and reported 94% patient satisfaction. Its case study also reports that digital preregistration saved an average of eight staff hours for every 50 emergency-department patients.²

At Resurrection Hospital Medical Group, Steer Health's omnichannel conversational AI platform helped generate more than 5,240 new appointments. Among patients who used Steer Health's conversational voice-agent workflows, the organization recorded a patient NPS above 96, according to company deployment data.

Separate from the patient NPS reported at Resurrection Hospital Medical Group, Steer Health reports a company-level +98 Net Promoter Score on its official LinkedIn profile.³ Together, these measures reflect a broader operating principle: enterprise AI earns trust when it is accountable for measurable results, integrates into existing workflows and reduces rather than adds operational complexity.

Advancing Agentic Workflows With Clinical Leaders

Steer Health's work is also part of a broader conversation among healthcare operators and clinicians about how AI agents should function in real care environments.

At Becker's Healthcare's 2025 annual meeting, Kishori Somyreddy, MD, Managing Director and Neurologist at Neurology Associates of Texas, joined Yerramreddy and leaders from Cone Health, Orange County Neurological Associates and Prime Healthcare for a featured session titled “AI Agent Workflows in Healthcare: From Fiction to Reality.”⁴

That conversation reflects an important requirement for healthcare AI: agentic workflows must be grounded in clinical realities, governed appropriately and designed to bring people into the loop when judgment is required. The goal is not to automate medicine. It is to automate and coordinate the operational work that prevents clinicians from spending more time with patients and patients from moving smoothly through care.

Technology in Service of a More Human Experience

The strongest evidence of impact is not always a dashboard metric.

In the Hearst interview, Yerramreddy recalled feedback from a patient who thanked Steer Health after discharge for helping coordinate between physicians. The patient said the experience had given them “a second life.”¹

That message captures why the work before and after the visit matters. When instructions are clear, communication arrives in the patient's preferred language, the next appointment is actually scheduled and a care-team exception is surfaced at the right time, technology becomes less visible—and the experience becomes more human.

Winning the Hearst Health Prize is meaningful third-party validation of this mission. It also creates a higher standard for what comes next.

With more than 21 million patients now served across 42 states, Steer Health's next phase is focused on expanding impact while continuing to reduce administrative burden for physicians and staff. Sustaining that scale requires preserving workflow reliability across different EHRs, scheduling rules, specialties, patient populations and care settings.

The architecture has been built for that challenge: one operating platform, specialized agents, shared patient context and completed actions returned to the systems healthcare organizations already use.

“We want to keep simplifying the burden on physicians and staff,” Yerramreddy told Hearst, “and collaborate with like-minded organizations along the way. Ultimately, it’s about creating more humanized experiences in healthcare.”¹

Read the Full Interview

Read Hearst's full conversation with Sridhar Yerramreddy: Closing the Gaps in Patient Care Through the Hearst Health Prize.

To learn more about Steer Health's platform and customer outcomes, visit steerhealth.io and review the company's customer case studies.

About Steer Health

Steer Health is an agentic AI operating platform for healthcare operations. Its specialized agents coordinate work across patient access, scheduling, clinical documentation, care coordination and revenue operations using shared patient context and integration with existing EHR systems. Founded in 2021, Steer Health helps hospitals, health systems and medical groups complete operational work at scale while allowing clinicians and staff to focus on the decisions, relationships and care that require a human.

Steer Health won the 2026 Hearst Health Prize, presented in partnership with the UCLA Center for SMART Health.

Steer Health's Agentic AI Platform Wins the 2026 Hearst Health Prize for Closing Gaps in Patient Care