Media Roundup: Elation Health Acquires Aster

On June 2 we announced our acquisition of Aster, an AI-native women's health EHR. The team coming over — sisters Fifi Kara and Dr. Lailah Kara-Newton, and CTO Nacho Vazquez — has built voice AI agents that handle the front-office work that consumes much of a practice's day: scheduling, insurance verification, patient adherence, lab follow-up, and care navigation. Nine outlets covered the news. Here's what each focused on.

What the deal brings to the platform

Fierce Healthcare had the most detailed write-up, including an interview with Kyna. On where this fits in Elation's broader work:

"We are not interested in the hype of AI so much as we are interested in the step function impact, the time saved and the ability to focus on patients that has been central to Elation's mission since our founding."

Kyna also pointed to time-savings data from clinicians already using Elation's AI features — six to ten hours per week. The piece traces what we've been building over the past year: Anthropic's Claude embedded in Clinical Insights in January, agentic billing workflows in March, and now Aster.

MobiHealthNews and HLTH both ran shorter takes focused on Atlas, the voice AI agent the Aster team built. HIStalk Practice included the news in their daily briefing.

The team behind Aster

Sisters Fifi Kara and Dr. Lailah Kara-Newton co-founded Aster in 2023 along with CTO Nacho Vazquez. Dr. Kara-Newton is an OB-GYN who practiced for more than seven years across the NHS and has published research with the WHO and the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists. Fifi is a two-time founder, a Y Combinator alum, and previously led design for Meta's Health & Fitness organization.

They started the company after Dr. Kara-Newton's first pregnancy, during which undiagnosed preeclampsia led to an emergency C-section and a NICU admission for her son. In a LinkedIn post she shared after the acquisition, quoted by AfroTech:

"Six years ago during the birth of my son, I got to experience what it was like being on both sides of the healthcare system, and that changed something in me. I decided with Fifi Kara to build the tools that could have protected us."

Fifi described their founding question this way:

"Could we make the act of delivering care far more enjoyable, far more manageable, and ultimately far safer for the patients and families on the receiving end?"

People of Color in Tech and AfroTech both wrote about what the acquisition represents for a Black women-founded health tech company, particularly given persistent maternal care disparities in the U.S. FemTech World covered the deal for an international women's health audience. Femtech Insider put it this way:

"While Aster's women's health-specific EHR won't continue as a standalone product, the AI expertise and autonomous agent capabilities it developed for women's health workflows now feed into a platform reaching millions of patients — potentially embedding women's health intelligence into primary care infrastructure at scale."

Where this is going

Healthcare Innovation ran a Q&A with Kyna that stepped back from the deal and looked at where AI in primary care is heading. From the interview:

"What we're seeing now is the next evolution: moving beyond single-purpose AI tools toward agents that can take on comprehensive, complex, and repetitive end-to-end administrative workflows."

She also cited our Primary Care Pulse Survey:78.8% of clinicians said they're already using AI and that it has affected their practice favorably, and 45% of practices plan to invest further in AI or automation within one to three years. A separate finding from the same survey — 71.5% of clinicians are doing EHR work after hours daily or almost daily — is the one that explains why agentic AI matters for primary care specifically.

The Fierce piece closed on the same point. Kyna:

"Agentic  AI support allows a PCP to experience the relief of a burden being lifted from their shoulders because something can be taken care of, they don't have to worry about it, and that frees up headspace for them, for the judgment and the care for their patients to take center stage."

Learn more about how Elation is building the future of clinical-first AI for primary care.