Mission Critical AI For Patient Mental Health In Acute Situations

Acuity Health builds mission-critical AI-augmented software for inpatient behavioral health hospitals and emergency departments, addressing one of healthcare’s most persistent operational challenges: how to safely staff, fund, and manage psychiatric care amid rising acuity, chronic clinician shortages, and increasing payer scrutiny.

AI for mission-critical patient acuity

The company’s core platform, the Behavioral Health Acuity Index (BHAI), establishes a standardized, quantifiable measure of patient acuity for inpatient behavioral health settings. Developed by health-system operators for real-world clinical environments, BHAI enables hospitals to align staffing with patient needs, improve patient and staff safety, and introduce objective, data-driven rigor into operational planning and payer negotiations.

BHAI integrates directly into Epic workflows, allowing nurses to capture structured data during routine patient interactions. That data is analyzed through a cloud-based SaaS platform to deliver real-time acuity insights that replace subjective judgment and spreadsheet-driven processes with a consistent, defensible operational standard. The platform is live in production across multiple health systems, with additional deployments underway, and is supported by third-party clinical and operational validation work with leading providers.

Optimizing healthcare staffing, reducing ER wait time with AI

Building on this foundation, Acuity Health has expanded its AI capabilities into emergency care through NORA, its AI-driven behavioral health assistant. At Tanner Health in Villa Rica, Georgia, NORA helps emergency departments standardize psychiatric acuity in minutes, optimize staffing in real time for high-complexity behavioral health cases, and reduce ER bottlenecks driven by psychiatric patients—who historically remain in emergency departments up to three times longer than non-psychiatric patients. By rapidly analyzing patient data and generating acuity classifications and staffing recommendations, NORA reduces hours-to-days of manual chart review, relieves clinician stress, and improves throughput in one of healthcare’s most capacity-constrained environments. This work has been highlighted by Healthgrades as a leading example of applied AI in behavioral health operations.

Acuity Health operates on a recurring, multi-year SaaS licensing model priced on a per-bed, per-day basis and paid annually, aligning well with hospital budgeting and scale economics. The company’s early development was supported by five major health systems that contributed both capital and domain expertise to build and refine the algorithms now embedded in the platform.

The company is led by Founder and CEO Jim Szyperski, a seasoned behavioral health software executive with deep domain experience and a personal commitment to improving mental health care delivery. Valor first engaged with Acuity Health in 2023 and invested in early 2025, backing the team’s conviction that standardized acuity measurement and AI-enabled staffing intelligence are foundational infrastructure for the future of behavioral health and emergency care operations.