Neil Batlivala has spent seven years building Pair Team, a healthcare company that serves patient populations often overlooked by Silicon Valley. That work landed him at the center of a major healthcare experiment last month when his company was selected to participate in ACCESS—a Medicare program testing what AI-driven medical care could look like at federal scale. Pair Team was one of 150 organizations chosen by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. The program officially launches July 5.
ACCESS, which stands for Advancing Chronic Care with Effective, Scalable Solutions, is a 10-year CMS initiative that shifts how healthcare providers get paid. Instead of reimbursing based on the number of clinician visits or time spent with patients, the program rewards actual health outcomes. Organizations like Pair Team receive predictable payments for managing qualifying conditions but earn the full amount only when patients hit measurable goals, such as lowering blood pressure or reducing pain. The program covers diabetes, hypertension, chronic kidney disease, obesity, depression, and anxiety.
The payment structure represents a fundamental shift in how Medicare operates. Traditional Medicare reimburses based on time spent with a clinician, with no mechanism to pay for AI agents that monitor patients between visits, make check-in calls, coordinate social services like housing referrals, or ensure medication adherence. ACCESS creates that mechanism for the first time. "It's a payment model transformation," Batlivala said. "You just couldn't do this before."
The first cohort spans a diverse range of participants, including AI doctor startups, virtual nutrition therapy providers, connected device companies, and wearable makers like Whoop. Batlivala expressed skepticism about some of his fellow participants, noting that wearables may have limited impact on seniors dealing with food insecurity. Pair Team, which launched in 2019, has been building toward this moment for more than five years, positioning itself to compete in what Batlivala described as "swim lanes for AI innovation in traditionally regulated industries."