Ascertain, a healthcare AI company creation platform, today announced the formation of its leadership team with the appointment of CEO Mark Michalski, M.D. and Executive Chairman, Gregg Fergus. Michalski and Fergus will lead Ascertain in its mission to merge deep technical, operational, and clinical expertise to deliver high-quality, equitable, and affordable healthcare.
Michalski brings two decades of executive leadership experience to Ascertain. Prior to Ascertain, Michalski led strategic development for healthcare and life sciences at Amazon, was Founding Executive Director at Mass General Brigham/Harvard’s Center for Clinical Data Science, and served as President and CMO of two publicly traded companies – Butterfly Network and Hyperfine Research. He is a board-certified radiologist and completed his medical training at Yale and Stanford.
Fergus and Michalski met and collaborated closely at the venture studio 4Catalyzer where Fergus was CEO, launching several leading healthcare companies including Butterfly Network, Hyperfine Research, AI Therapeutics, and Quantum Si. Prior to joining 4Catalyzer, Fergus served as President and COO of the DNA sequencing company, Ion Torrent. Products from these market-leading companies have wide-ranging applications, including cancer research, medical imaging, and point-of-care diagnostics.
“Health systems are facing unrelenting financial pressures and an unprecedented workforce crisis. It is challenging to watch the impacts on my provider colleagues and their patients,” said Dr. Michalski. “I’ve seen what is possible when you bring best-in-field technologists together with deep clinical know-how. We have an opportunity to re-engineer the experience of healthcare, equitably, and for all patients.”
“When I started my career, scientists had just mapped the human genome, unlocking a new era of innovation in medicine. I expect AI will do even more to transform the healthcare system,” said Fergus. “We have a unique opportunity with Northwell Health to create innovative companies and solve the hard problems in healthcare. Now is the time to deliver the promise of AI and meaningfully impact the healthcare industry.”
Recent breakthroughs in generative AI and large language models have unprecedented potential to address the highly variable and manual tasks that dominate healthcare. These AI tools have the unique potential to automate the administrative tasks that plague providers and cause growing workforce burnout. Ascertain was launched by Northwell Holdings and Aegis Ventures to seize this opportunity: the company’s partnership with Northwell Health provides deep access to the diverse insights and large datasets necessary to build, launch, and scale AI-enabled solutions.
“As our collaboration with Ascertain moves forward, we see tremendous opportunity to develop and implement AI solutions which improve operational efficiencies and ease the administrative burden placed on healthcare providers, giving them back precious time with their patients,” said Mark Solazzo, President of Strategic Initiatives and Chief Operating Officer of Northwell Health. “This is a pivotal moment in healthcare and we are excited to lead efforts to advance this work.”
“Ascertain will play a central role in the Aegis ecosystem, building the technology that enables more affordable and equitable systems of care,” said John Beadle, Co-founder and Managing Partner of Aegis Ventures. “Under Mark and Gregg’s leadership, we are more confident than ever that Ascertain will become the platform partner of choice for health systems as they move towards an AI-enabled future.”
This expansion of its leadership team is part of Ascertain’s ongoing efforts to build a world-class, interdisciplinary AI team to create and support its portfolio companies. Earlier this year, Ascertain announced a $12M seed funding round to launch Optain, an AI company that enables early identification and disease prevention through retinal imaging.
About Ascertain
Ascertain is a healthcare AI company creation platform, focused on merging deep technical and clinical expertise to deliver high-quality, equitable, and affordable healthcare. Launched by Northwell Holdings, the for-profit investment arm of Northwell Health, and Aegis Ventures, Ascertain brings Northwell’s deep clinical and operational expertise together with experienced technologists to solve healthcare’s most challenging problems. In 2023, Ascertain launched Optain, an AI-enabled preventive health company to noninvasively diagnose eye and systemic health conditions in real time. To learn more about Ascertain, visit our website and follow us on LinkedIn.
About Aegis Ventures
Aegis Ventures is a next-generation startup studio that partners with entrepreneurs and industry leaders to originate, launch, and scale transformative companies. The Aegis platform brings together market-shaping ideas, permanent growth capital, and ambitious individuals driven to solve major societal problems. Aegis aims to build companies with the capacity for vast impact, with an initial focus on artificial intelligence and digital health. Within these verticals, Aegis targets the creation of companies that leverage technology to better optimize tradeoffs between quality, access, and cost, focusing on innovations that promote seamless continuity of care, patient empowerment, and better-informed clinical decision-making. To learn more about Aegis, visit our website and follow us on LinkedIn.
About Northwell Holdings
Northwell Holdings (“Holdings”), a fully owned, for-profit subsidiary of Northwell Health, creates value for the health system by investing in early-stage companies, establishing commercial joint ventures, cultivating internally-developed ideas and bringing them to market, and advancing data collaborations that drive innovation in patient care, health diagnostics, and deep technology. We invest in companies that are aligned with Northwell’s mission, promote better health outcomes, improve patient experience, and increase efficiencies in care delivery and services. Through strategic collaborations, Holdings leverages the health system’s robust enterprise data assets to develop AI-enabled solutions that address healthcare inequities. We combine Northwell Health’s clinical and healthcare business expertise and entrepreneurial spirit to bring concepts to life. Northwell Health is New York’s largest healthcare system. To learn more, visit us here and follow us on LinkedIn.
