Healthtech startup Tennr focuses on using artificial intelligence to automate workflow and document capture and fix front office patient referral systems.
The company is now targeting a major bottleneck in the pre-visit process: time-consuming, routine phone calls. The company says Tennr has built-in phone calling capabilities into its platform, allowing providers to automate multiple calls at the same time without increasing headcount. Provider front-office teams can manage routine calls associated with active orders, including investigating payer benefits, following up on documentation, welcoming patients and confirming orders, and responding to resupplies, all without leaving the system.
Using voice AI for automated phone calls allows healthcare providers to increase patient throughput without proportionally increasing staffing, executives said.
Founded in 2021, Tennr is focused on closing operational gaps in patient referrals to specialists. This process can be complex, manual, and time-consuming. When primary care physicians refer patients to specialists, those referrals come by fax, email, or electronic portal and can quickly add up.
Some medical professionals refer to this as a “black hole problem” because patients can fall out of the system and there is no visibility into their medical journey.
Tennr has built a language model designed to read references, parse documents, extract relevant information and route appropriately, and automate workflows to reduce error rates and processing time.
Tennr was founded by three Stanford engineering students, Trey Halterman, Diego Bo, and Tyler Johnson, who were working on advanced AI and large-scale language models. The company built RaeLM, a proprietary vision language model trained on 100 million anonymized medical documents, 2.3 billion distinct data fields, and 8,000 sets of criteria. The company says that unlike typical large-scale language models, RaeLM is optimized to understand subtle data in clinical notes, scanned forms, and checkboxes. Evaluate documents against complex payer criteria to flag potential rejections and ensure cleaner submissions from the beginning.
The company says it currently processes more than 10 million documents each month and works with more than 150 healthcare providers.
Professional healthcare providers still rely heavily on telephone calls, in addition to faxes and emails, to collect missing information or communicate with patients to confirm insurance details or schedule appointments.
“When we talk about solving this problem and getting patients out of the black hole and getting them into care, it’s not enough to just make sure we have all the documentation to send a text or something like that. We had to bring in voice because that’s where the bottleneck was for most of our customers,” Tennr CEO Holterman told Fierce Healthcare at a first look at the new feature.
“After receiving an order or introduction 2 Within minutes, we could know that a patient was missing valid insurance information, but when it came to going out and getting that information, we were forced to rely on the manual, existing processes that healthcare providers currently use. “Introducing an integrated automated phone call was a natural next step for us, so that once we know what’s missing, we can properly coordinate with patients to assist with their care,” Holterman said.
Tennr focused on the phone interactions that consume the most time for healthcare provider teams and built those interactions directly into their product. The company says medical staff can now initiate and manage calls within Tennr, centralizing work in one place and freeing staff to focus on higher-value work.
While investment in voice AI in healthcare is surging, Halterman sees voice as a function that will become commoditized. Companies solving specific problems in the healthcare sector can benefit from voice AI infrastructure providers to build automated calling capabilities into their platforms. The key to making voice AI valuable to healthcare providers, he noted, is embedding it within existing patient workflows.
“The entire healthcare IT industry is obsessed with medical claims and denials, their processing and appeals. Very few people are obsessed with orders and referrals. By adding phone calls, we’re saying, ‘We’re going to be able to do this with all these great features that these infrastructure providers have built. “We’re saying, ‘We can just apply it and we can solve the problem by allowing a problem-obsessed company like Tennr to add it to the problem of solving the problem of referrals and dealing with the black hole in healthcare,'” he said.
Tennr pursues the “hairy” document reviews that nearly all specialty providers have to grapple with, building a custom orchestration engine specifically for referral-based care.
“We’re thinking about edge cases around calls and referrals 10 times more deeply than typical voice AI solutions. Fundamentally, I think you’ll find that infrastructure providers are going to specialize in channels that are very difficult to navigate, and people like us are going to be focused on problems where calls are just one aspect of it, not the whole story,” Holterman said.
In June, Tennr raised $101 million in a Series C round to fuel growth. The company initially focused on patient intake and document review processes, but has since expanded its capabilities, Halterman told Fierce Healthcare in June. Tennr has also built other product lines, including entitlement benefits products, entitlement claims engine products, communications coordinators, patient experience and certification review products.
The company is growing rapidly and in November brought on Maurik Shah as general manager to accelerate its efforts in health systems. Tennr recently hired former Cleveland Clinic and Google executive Dr. William Morris as chief medical officer.
Tennr is expanding into more clinical specialties and hopes to bring on physician leaders who can “speak the language” of the company’s provider customers, Halterman said.
“We are experiencing tremendous growth in orthopedics, cardiology, fertility, and even health systems. We want to accelerate our center of excellence team. “As we expand into more areas of expertise, it’s really important to have the voice of providers in the room to help design our products and communicate with our customers,” he said.
