Pepper Clinical Partner Program
Pepper Clinical Partner Program.
For physicians who believe the most important moments in a patient’s health happen between appointments.
What Pepper does
Patterns a single visit cannot reveal, delivered as structured clinical briefs.
Pepper is a physician-prescribed device that lives in a patient's home and engages them in ordinary conversation. It translates what it learns into clinical insight, so you can act earlier rather than react later. To the patient it feels like a companion. To you it is a clinical instrument.
Before every appointment you receive a Pre-Visit Brief. Three minutes to read, with the clinically relevant signals from how that patient has actually been living. If something is building, you know now rather than at the next scheduled visit.
Pepper was designed with our Chief Clinical Officer, Dr David Wetherhold, a practising internal medicine physician and Chief Medical Information Officer at a leading medical institution with thirty years in practice. Every clinical decision in the product has been made alongside someone who still sees patients.
Personal health data never leaves the device. Clinical data moves through a secure, encrypted pathway to the care team.
CLINICAL SAFETY AND SCOPE
Pepper surfaces. You interpret.
Pepper reports observations. It does not diagnose, generate clinical scores, or recommend treatment. If a patient mentions light-headedness on standing four times in three weeks, the brief tells you that, with the patient's own words. It does not tell you what it means.
Clinical judgement stays entirely with you. That is a deliberate design decision.
Where a patient discloses something acute, Pepper escalates under protocols developed with our Chief Clinical Officer rather than responding at its own discretion.
The Clinical Partner Program
A 90-day pilot with a small number of founding practices beginning winter 2026.
We are launching a 90-day pilot with three practices, starting winter 2026. Our first partners are in Central and Western New York, and we are actively in conversation with health systems beyond it.
Practices join in sequence, one per month, rather than all at once. It means the practice joining Pepper is not one of three simultaneous launches, it is the focus of that month, with the full attention of our team through onboarding.
You would be among the first practices in the Pepper Clinical Partner Program, and your feedback would shape how Pepper works in the real world.
The pilot, both ways
What we ask, and what we provide.
On-site training sessions for the lead physician and select practitioners.
Enrollment of patients, under appropriate disclosures and your clinical judgment.
The lead physician and select practitioners to work alongside the Pepper team.
Feedback during and after the pilot — what works, what doesn’t, what you’d want next.
Participation from the lead physician, select practitioners and, where relevant, practice administrator and support team.
A non-binding letter of intent to participate, subject to funding and to your own governance processes.
All equipment at no cost to your practice.
A dedicated Pepper program manager and clinical liaison for the full 90 days, absorbing the operational work of onboarding.
Structured clinical briefs on enrolled patients giving you patterns across time a single visit cannot reveal.
Your own Pepper access, the same product your patients experience.
Membership in a founding community of Pepper Clinical Partner Program practices.
Support with billing setup from day one.
The billing picture
You bill under existing RTM codes from day one.
Pilot partners will bill under existing Medicare RTM reimbursement pathways (CPT 98975–98981) from day one, with Pepper’s support at every step.
No new reimbursement category needs to exist for this to be paid for. Pepper does the monitoring, so the revenue does not come at the cost of additional clinical time.
The research opportunity
A longitudinal picture that does not currently exist.
The pilot generates something clinical research has not had: a continuous record of how people actually live between appointments, gathered in their own words over months rather than captured in a time-limited study.
Alongside the clinical pilot we run two research communities, one with participating patients and one with participating physicians, examining what Pepper surfaces, what changes clinical decisions, and what patients experience.
For academic centres and systems with a research mandate, this is a genuine opportunity to shape and publish from an entirely new class of clinical data. We would welcome that conversation.
Who we are looking for
Practices and systems already thinking about continuity.
We are talking to independent primary care practices, hospital and system-affiliated practices, academic medical centres and functional medicine practices, led by an MD. Our first partners are in Central and Western New York, and we are in active conversation with systems in other regions.
The right fit is a physician already thinking about how to offer patients more continuity, and a practice or department able to move with us across a 90-day pilot.
In independent practices, decision-makers typically include the physician owner and practice manager. In larger systems and academic centres, this usually involves a Chief Medical Information Officer, Chief Innovation Officer, Chief Medical Officer, VP of Operations, or a departmental or practice-plan lead.
Join the program
If this sounds like your practice, tell us.
Share your details to indicate interest. A member of the Pepper team will follow up directly.