Sword Intelligence

Meet Mark Ratnarajah, our Clinical Director and part of the growing UK team. Mark spent almost 30 years as a pediatrician before making the leap into healthcare technology. So when he challenges an idea, it’s not theoretical. It’s muscle memory from decades of real decisions, real kids, and real consequences. He joined Sword Intelligence just a few months ago, but somehow already feels like he’s always been here. Calm, generous, relentlessly positive. The kind of presence that makes a team feel more grounded by default. A detail we love: before healthcare and tech, Mark was a competitive ballroom dancer. And honestly, it tracks. Sharp turns, perfect timing, and zero room for stepping on anyone else’s toes. If healthcare had a dance floor, he’d be gliding across it while the rest of us counted beats. Mark keeps our Intelligence human and grounded. Oh, and he loads the dishwasher with clinical precision. Say hi 👋

A single star says a lot. 🫣 And most times, it's not about bedside manner or clinical outcomes. It's about whether your operation actually shows up for people. If you’re running a healthcare organization, print these reviews and stick them on your wall. That’s how real patients are rating the organizations that keep them waiting on the endless loop of operational chaos. When your back- and front-office work, patients don’t notice. When they don’t work, you get one star. Choose the first option. All it takes is a bit of Intelligence. 😉

Most Medicare Advantage leaders talk about ⭐️ Star Ratings as a strategy problem. 2026 makes it clear it’s an "execution at scale" problem. As CMS keeps tightening cut points and compressing distributions, the difference between 3.0 and 4.0 stars is no longer a flashy big bet or a bold initiative. It’s whether your organization can execute millions of small interactions (screenings, refills, callbacks, follow-ups) without dropping the ball. That’s what this report breaks down: • Why execution at scale is now the dominant Star driver • How HD1, HD2, and HD3 are being won (or lost) operationally • The patterns shaping 2026 performance... and where CMS might be heading next If Stars matter to your growth, this is worth a read. 👉 https://lnkd.in/ecB3PfEp PS: And if you’d rather skip the form(alities), just DM Matt Laurence and get it straight from the source.

Why does healthcare keep buying “best-in-class tools”, but still runs on workarounds? Because care can't be fixed with a single workflow. It’s a system of many small, interdependent ones, constantly changing, constantly under pressure. Every point solution solves a problem… and quietly creates three more. That’s why we built Sword Intelligence as a Modular Intelligence Platform (we like to call it MIP). A system of AI Care Managers that work together, draw from different inputs, and plug into the workflows you already have. You don’t have to transform everything at once. You start where friction is the highest. And you build a system that grows with your operations. Modularity isn’t a technical choice; it’s how intelligence stays useful and applicable in real care. 👇 Explore how MIP works on the link below.

It’s time to introduce João Vieira Pereira, though around here, everyone just calls him JP. JP is calm by default, but don’t mistake that for quiet agreement. He’s not shy about sharing his opinions. If he doesn’t like something, you’ll know. Clearly. Immediately. (Yes, this makes him a very tough client for marketing. But we’re better for it.) He leads our AI Engineering team, aka a group of people we fully believe are the Greatest Engineers Of All Time. Hence the nickname. JP has been at Sword long enough to have seen things evolve, break, get rebuilt, and work better the second (or third) time around. It shows in how he thinks, decides, and pushes back when something doesn’t feel right. Recently, JP became a first-time dad… of Eddie, the Dobermann! We hear that it requires calm authority, quiet discipline, and lots of patience. A different challenge. The same operating principles. Btw, he's also extremely tall. Like, “could’ve played basketball” tall. Instead, he chose to change healthcare. We think that was the right call. Meet JP, the steady engineering mind behind Sword Intelligence.

👀 We're HIRING engineers, for some of the hardest problems we’ve worked on. Not because the tech is flashy. But because the constraints are real, the stakes are human, and the edge cases never end. We build AI systems for healthcare: that means messy data, custom workflows, and humans in the loop. No clean abstractions will survive first contact with the reality of healthcare. But when we get it working, it actually matters. We’re growing fast and building out our engineering team across backend, ML, AI, prompt engineering, and QA. If you want to do the most interesting work of your career, we should talk: https://lnkd.in/e4YBW9D3

This is probably our last post of the year... and yes, like everyone else, we couldn’t resist doing a Wrapped. Not about us though, about the things healthcare operations have been dealing with all year long (on repeat). So here’s Healthcare Ops Wrapped 2025, a quick look back before everyone fully checks out, shuts the laptop, and starts asking the only question that really matters: what are we not taking into 2026?

Oh finally, the last two weeks of the year are here. OOO replies everywhere, calendars mysteriously empty, conversations already living in 2026, and Mariah Carey back like she never left. Healthcare, though, never really plays along. While everyone else talks about slowing down, this is when things actually get heavier. 'Tis the peak season... flu hits hard, calls pile up, queues get longer, and a lot of invisible work keeps everything standing. So instead of another “happy holidays” post, we rewrote a Christmas classic for the care coordinators, patient access teams, ops managers, and everyone holding it all together while the world switches off. If this sounds familiar, this one’s probably for you. PS: And maybe next peak season doesn’t have to feel the same, with our AI Care Managers by your side.

In the last two months, the Intelligence team has barely stayed in one place. We’ve been moving across countries and cities, from events and partner gatherings to client meetings and conversations with governments, sometimes on stage as invited speakers, sometimes behind the scenes, sometimes deep inside hospitals, with our engineers working shoulder to shoulder with care teams and learning how things really work. Some of those moments were public, most weren’t. But they all point to the same thing: the work is happening everywhere, fast, and close to the ground. This is how AI for healthcare operations actually gets built: inside real systems, alongside care teams, and through constant exchange with the healthcare ecosystem, where ideas are shared, challenged, and tested against real constraints and real stakes. 2026 is almost here, and the road is calling again. More places, more conversations, and a lot more coming. Stay with us 🏁