South Florida's ModMed Names a Chief AI Officer

ModMed's co-founder is now its first Chief AI Officer. The Boca Raton company says AI will reshape how practices treat patients and get paid.

A new title is showing up in healthcare software: Chief AI Officer. The person who answers for AI now sits at the executive table.

Boca Raton-based ModMed announced that co-founder Dan Cane will become its first Chief AI Officer. The company, backed by Clearlake Capital, serves specialty medical practices.

Joe Harpaz, who shared the CEO role with Cane for three years, now holds it alone. Celine Kaiser becomes chief operating officer.

Three Jobs for AI

The reshuffle is built around three areas: revenue cycle, clinical care and patient engagement. Each gets a founder or a veteran in charge.

Cane takes the money side. He will run the company’s AI strategy and the ModMed RCM AI Platform. The platform aims to help practices fight denials and resolve claims faster.

Co-founder Dr. Michael Sherling stays on as chief medical and strategy officer. He leads the clinical AI work, including ModMed Scribe.

ModMed says Scribe has supported nearly 3 million patient visits since its release 11 months ago. Clearlake partner Paul Huber called it the fastest-growing product in company history.

Those figures come from ModMed and its investor. The company did not offer independent measures of accuracy or time saved.

“We believe the value of clinical AI comes down to what it enables a physician to do for a patient,” Sherling said.

Kaiser, who joined in 2019, takes product management, customer success and the revenue cycle business.

Cane also keeps leading ModMed’s internal AI transformation. The company wants its own teams to rethink how work gets done, then pass those lessons to customers.

A Front Office Next

The third area is the front desk. ModMed bought Bonsai Health in April, and Bonsai co-founders now run patient engagement.

Luke Kervin will lead product development. Travis Schneider becomes general manager of patient engagement.

Together they are planning a 2027 launch of an agentic AI platform. It aims to handle routine patient requests and lift paperwork off front office staff.

The release says the platform is planned, not shipped. Details on what it will do remain thin.

Harpaz framed the shift as a bet on speed. “AI is changing what medical practices should expect from their technology partner,” he said.

South Florida’s Health AI Bench

ModMed is one of several South Florida health companies pulling AI into daily practice. Others are closer to Miami.

WellStack bought South Florida’s DeLorean AI, which uses AI to predict which patients may develop disease or need hospital care.

Hospitals are moving too. MAIN covered Baptist Health’s Miami Cancer Institute using AI on mammograms, where breast radiologists read more studies in less time.

Miami’s OpenEvidence has taken a different route. MAIN reported that clinicians can now open it inside Northwestern Medicine’s electronic health record, with no separate login.

Each model has the same goal: take work off clinicians, inside the system they already use.

A new title does not settle the hard questions. Practices will want to know what the tools cost and what happens when an AI draft is wrong. They may also ask who owns the data a scribe records.

The announcement is a leadership change, not a product result. Results will have to show up in denials, visit times and doctors’ evenings.

ModMed has moved AI from a feature to a job title. Practices will judge it on what the tools deliver.

Sources: