Healthcare AI company Commure has built a platform that automates end-to-end referral management and patient intake.
The company designed a platform called Commure Orchestrator to close the gap between submitted referrals and patients seen by eliminating fax-based workflows, reducing referral leakage, and reducing pre-visit administrative burden.
Industry data and research shows that the majority of medical referrals (35% to 50%) are not completed and do not result in specialist consultation. And the actual process takes an average of 31 days and often involves fax machines, authorization holds, and manual handoffs. These bottlenecks lead to missed referrals, which means lost revenue for providers and deprives patients of the care they need.
“Every referral that doesn’t convert is a failed patient and revenue never shows up on the books,” Dan Warner, president of Commune, said in a statement. “Orchestrator automates the entire pre-visit workflow so neither of those things need to happen.”
Commure provides AI tools and agents that are integrated into the workflows of health systems and providers. The company’s technology is primarily focused on simplifying administrative tasks, which Comure says are used around $1 trillion annually across the country.
A new referral management and patient intake solution streamlines the entire pre-visit workflow. Ingest any unstructured data source, extract structured clinical and payer data, validate against your organization’s business rules, coordinate your entire team with integrated dashboard queues, and write accepted referrals directly into your electronic health record system.
Commure Orchestrator is designed to work across healthcare settings, including inpatient, outpatient, post-acute, home health, hospice, and specialty care. The company says its platform is already running in home and outpatient medical systems, handling hundreds of thousands of tasks completely autonomously.
Commure can also close the loop and enable a seamless handoff from referral to patient visit through an AI agent. Once a referral is accepted and a patient is scheduled for an appointment, a digital receptionist guides the patient through consent, pre-visit forms, and insurance collection.
Orchestrator will run on Commure’s unified data model, connect ambient AI downstream to enable clinical workflows, and connect RCM to the revenue cycle, executives said.
The company says the platform addresses key operational bottlenecks. A real-time referral queue connected to automated outreach helps prevent patient attrition, and real-time referral triage and provider matching allows for faster response times, higher referral acceptance rates, and a better patient experience.
Automated payer verification and pre-approval tracking eliminates the need for manual portal checks or last-minute reservation cancellations. The company says pre-visit intakes flow directly into the EHR as structured data rather than PDF attachments, reducing intake effort. Commure’s single platform also replaces a disparate mix of fax workflows, reception tools, and referral management software.
In May, Communia raised $70 million in new funding, bringing it to a $7 billion valuation, and plans to continue expanding its platform and building out its technology. At the time, Comure said it planned to expand its revenue cycle and extend its practice management tools to specialty clinics, hospitals, and an integrated delivery network. A year ago, the company raised $200 million.
Commure was born by General Catalyst in 2017 and launched in 2020. In October 2023, the company merged with Athelas, a provider of medical workflow automation software, to capture a larger portion of the medical systems market. Nine months later, in July 2024, Commure acquired healthcare AI company Augmedix for $139 million, giving it a foothold in the AI medical scribing market. In December 2024, the company acquired Memora Health, a digital care navigation platform launched from the Harvard University Institute for Innovation.
The company has steadily built a technology stack to provide healthcare organizations with AI-powered solutions for clinical documentation, revenue cycle management, and practice management operations. A year ago, Commure launched a suite of AI agents designed to automate complex tasks and tackle front-office functions along with patient navigation, care management, and revenue cycle.
