Introduction
Regard is a Los Angeles-based digital health company founded in 2017 that builds clinical artificial intelligence to help physicians capture complete, accurate diagnoses at the point of care. Eli Ben-Joseph co-founded Regard and serves as chief executive officer per the company’s about page reviewed in July 2026. Regard’s thesis — that documentation, quality metrics, and revenue integrity are all downstream of diagnoses missed during the encounter — distinguishes it from ambient scribe vendors focused primarily on note generation after the visit.
At Health Evolution Summit in Dana Point, California, in April 2026, Ben-Joseph joined Memorial Hermann and Monument Health leaders for a panel moderated by Regard chief medical officer Dr. David Kirk on proactive documentation and the future of clinical AI. The session framed ambient documentation as increasingly table stakes while the unread structured and unstructured data sitting in electronic health records represents the next frontier for AI that changes care rather than summarizing what is already documented.
What the company does
Regard applies AI to organize and interpret patient chart data — labs, notes, histories, medications, and prior encounters — so clinicians see relevant diagnostic suggestions while writing the note rather than receiving clinical documentation improvement queries days or weeks later. Ben-Joseph has described passing an entire chart into a general language model as producing noisy outputs until a dedicated data-cleaning layer structures information for clinical use; Regard’s product work centers on that structuring problem inside Epic and other EHR workflows.
The company positions every CDI query as a failure mode: a diagnosis that should have been recognized at the bedside becomes retrospective rework, payer denials, or missed revenue. Regard aims to shift recognition upstream, producing a more accurate clinical record for the next clinician and reducing the back-end infrastructure health systems built to recover what hospitalists missed while carrying twenty-eight to thirty-two patients per day.
Regard did not start as a revenue cycle company, Ben-Joseph stated at HES 2026 — the founding mission was empowering clinicians to do their best work, with coding and billing benefits following when documentation reflects the full clinical picture at the point of care.
Who it serves
Regard sells to integrated delivery networks and hospital medicine programs where documentation burden, CDI query volume, and case mix index directly affect financial and quality performance. Memorial Hermann chief informatics officer Dr. Nnaemeka Okafor described post-Epic migration physicians as overwhelmed by information access rather than lacking data — a problem Regard addresses by filtering signal from chart noise. Monument Health CIO Dr. Patrick Woodard emphasized tools that help clinicians document without forcing them to think differently about documentation are the ones that achieve adoption.
Health system leaders evaluating Regard typically measure DRG mix, case mix index, Vizient quality scores, physician after-hours documentation time, and CDI staffing load — metrics Okafor mapped to revenue protection, patient safety, staff satisfaction, consumer access, and resource management when documentation improves at the bedside.
Company background
Ben-Joseph founded Regard in 2017 in Los Angeles with a clinical-first hypothesis: get diagnoses right during the encounter and downstream revenue cycle, quality, and coding outcomes improve together. The company grew through health-system partnerships where co-design with physicians — what Okafor summarized as doing it with doctors, not for or to them — determined whether AI recommendations reached adoption at scale.
Regard’s leadership includes Dr. David Kirk as chief medical officer, who moderated the April 2026 Health Evolution Summit panel and articulated the blunt operational framing that every CDI query represents a failure to capture clinical truth at the right moment.
Product and AI capabilities
Regard’s AI stack emphasizes structured chart intelligence rather than ambient audio transcription alone. The platform ingests heterogeneous EHR data, cleans and organizes it for model consumption, and surfaces diagnosis recommendations inside physician documentation workflows where clinicians can accept, modify, or reject suggestions with clinical context fresh in memory — a defensibility advantage Woodard tied to payer audits when reconstruction happens far from the bedside.
Ben-Joseph identified agentic orchestration as infrastructure that will feel obvious within two years, alongside clean data layers health systems are now capable of building correctly rather than funding perpetual back-end query recovery. Regard’s product direction aligns with that shift from scribe-era AI toward agents that act on structured clinical data at decision time.
Key developments
2017: Regard founded in Los Angeles by Eli Ben-Joseph. April 21–23, 2026: HES 2026 panel on proactive documentation featuring Ben-Joseph, Memorial Hermann, and Monument Health leaders (regard.com article, official source). 2026: Regard continued publishing enterprise case narratives linking point-of-care diagnosis capture to revenue and quality outcomes.
Ben-Joseph’s HES 2026 remarks that scribe adoption is becoming table stakes while chart data remains largely unread at the moment of care summarize Regard’s 2026 market positioning relative to ambient documentation vendors.
Why it matters
Regard matters because 2026 health-system AI budgets are splitting between ambient scribes — now baseline expectations — and upstream clinical intelligence that prevents CDI and denial workflows from becoming permanent cost centers. Ben-Joseph’s argument that the clinical case and financial case are the same argument challenges organizations that measure documentation AI ROI separately from quality and physician retention — recruiting a physician costs roughly a million dollars in soft costs Woodard cited at HES 2026.
Regard sits alongside revenue integrity vendors such as SmarterDx but addresses a different failure point: missed diagnoses at documentation time rather than appeals after payer denials. Buyers evaluating both should map where their leakage occurs — bedside capture versus post-adjudication recovery.
Sector context
Regard belongs in Brel’s AI in healthcare coverage under digital health and clinical documentation AI, related to ambient documentation infrastructure from vendors such as Corti and health-system clinical AI platforms like K Health. Readers should distinguish point-of-care diagnosis intelligence from retrospective CDI analytics — integration depth inside Epic workflows is the practical adoption test.
Hospital medicine leaders drowning in CDI queries should evaluate whether vendor AI surfaces diagnoses during note writing or only after coders flag discrepancies — the timing difference determines defensibility with payers and clinician willingness to engage.
Sources and references
Regard HES 2026 article (April 2026) and About Us leadership page.
- Regard — The next frontier in clinical AI: HES 2026 (regard.com, April 2026)
- Regard — About Us / leadership (regard.com)
Reviewed July 10, 2026. Eli Ben-Joseph is co-founder and CEO. Primary domain regard.com; withregard.com does not resolve.