Health tech startup Tennr is focused on using artificial intelligence to fix the front office patient referral system by automating workflows and documentation intake.
The company is now taking aim at a major bottleneck in the pre-visit process—time-intensive routine phone calls. Tennr has embedded a phone calling feature into its platform that enables providers to automate multiple calls simultaneously without adding head count, according to the company. Provider front-office teams can manage routine calls tied to active orders without leaving the system, including payer benefits investigations, documentation follow-up, patient welcome and order confirmation and resupply outreach.
The use of voice AI for automated phone calls can help providers increase patient throughput without proportionally increasing head count, executives said.
Founded in 2021, Tennr is focused on closing operational gaps in patient referrals to specialists, which can be a complicated, highly manual and slow process. When a primary care doctor refers a patient to a specialist, those referrals come in by fax, email or e-portal, and they can quickly pile up.
Some healthcare professionals refer to this as the "black hole problem," as patients can fall out of the system and there's no visibility into the patient healthcare journey.
Tennr built language models designed to read referrals, parse through documents, extract relevant information and route it appropriately and then automate workflows, reducing error rates and processing times.
Tennr was founded by three Stanford University engineering students—Trey Holterman, Diego Baugh and Tyler Johnson—who were working on advanced AI and large language model research. The company built RaeLM, its proprietary vision-language model trained on 100 million anonymized healthcare documents, 2.3 billion distinct data fields and 8,000 sets of criteria. Unlike generic large language models, RaeLM is optimized to understand the nuanced data in clinical notes, scanned forms and checkboxes, according to the company. It evaluates documents against complex payer criteria to flag potential denials and ensure cleaner submissions from the start.
The company says it now processes more than 10 million documents a month and works with more than 150 healthcare organizations.
Along with fax and email, specialty providers still rely heavily on the phone to collect missing information and to communicate with patients in order to confirm insurance details and appointment scheduling.
"When you're talking about solving this problem, getting patients out of the black hole and getting them to care, it's not enough just to make sure that they have all the documentation just to send texts and things, we had to bring in voice, because that's where the bottleneck for most of our customers had moved," Holterman, Tennr CEO, told Fierce Healthcare in a first look at the new capability.
"We can tell when a patient is missing valid insurance information within two minutes of receiving that order or that referral, but in terms of going out and getting that information, we were forced to rely on the manual, existing processes that providers use today. It was a logical next step for us to bring in automated phone calls that were integrated directly into that workflow so you could coordinate right with the patient, right when you know what's missing, to help get them care," Holterman said.
Tennr looked at the phone interactions that consume the most time for medical provider teams and built those interactions directly into its product. Medical staff can now initiate and manage calls inside Tennr, and this keeps work in one place and frees staff to focus on higher-value tasks, according to the company.
Voice AI in healthcare is seeing a surge of investment, but Holterman sees voice as a feature that will become commoditized. Companies solving specific problems in healthcare can benefit from voice AI infrastructure providers to build automated phone calling features into their platforms. The key to making voice AI valuable to providers is embedding it inside existing patient workflows, he noted.
"The entire healthcare IT industry has been obsessed with the medical claim and with denials and with working them and appeals. Very few folks have been obsessed with the order and with the referral. By adding phone calling, we're saying, 'these infrastructure providers built this incredible feature that a problem-obsessed company like Tennr gets to add into solving the problem of referral and solving the problem of addressing the black hole in healthcare, and we can just apply it and just solve it,'" he noted.
Tennr is going after "hairy" documentation reviews that almost every specialist provider has to tackle and is building a custom orchestration engine specifically for referral-based care.
"We're thinking about the edge cases that come up with phone calls and referrals 10 times deeper than a generic voice AI solution is. I think you're going to see basically the infrastructure providers are going to niche down into channels that are really hard to navigate and folks like us are going to focus around problems that have phone calling as just one facet, but not the whole thing," Holterman said.
In June, Tennr banked $101 million in a series C round to fuel its growth. The company was initially focused on the patient intake and documentation review process but has since expanded its capabilities, Holterman told Fierce Healthcare back in June. Tennr has built out other product lines including an eligibility benefits product, a qualifications billing engine product, a communication coordinator and a patient experience and an auth review product.
The company has been growing rapidly, and, in November, it brought on Maulik Shah as general manager to accelerate its reach with health systems. Tennr also recently hired William Morris, M.D., former Cleveland Clinic and Google executive, as its chief medical officer.
Tennr has been expanding into more clinical specialties and wanted to bring on board a physician leader who can "speak the language" of the company's provider customers, Holterman said.
"We have just seen incredible growth within orthopedics, cardiology, fertility and then health systems as well. We want to accelerate our Center of Excellence team, where we already have many operators from providers, a big team of folks that have lived the operational and administrative problems that we deal with. As we expand to more specialties, it's really important that we have the voice of the provider in the room, helping to architect our products and helping communicate to our customers," he noted.