Tennr just raised $101M of Series C funding to have AI help solve one of healthcare’s most timeless challenges: fax machines.
Tennr got its start in 2021 improving the patient intake and documentation review process, but has quickly expanded its capabilities to make sure that patients don’t get lost in a “black hole” during the referral process.
- More than one-third of Americans receive a medical referral each year, half of which aren’t completed due to miscommunication, misdirected referrals, or missing information.
- Tennr’s orchestration platform and proprietary language models automate these workflows to help providers convert more patients, cut denials, and deliver care without growing their teams.
The secret sauce is Tennr’s specialized language models (RaeLM), optimized to understand the nuanced data in medical determinations and evaluate it against strict payor criteria.
- Tennr integrates with over 50 types of e-faxes, phone lines, emails, and portals to collect patient information, then leverages RaeLM to structure the data into usable information that can be shared with EHRs and pharmacy management systems.
- The thesis was that if Tennr could read the documents and structure the data, it would be in a good spot to bolt-on more services – such as its eligibility benefits product, patient communication solution, and referral management suite.
The fresh funds will fuel the launch of the Tennr Network, designed to equip referring providers, receiving providers, and patients with real-time visibility into the referral status.
- Referring providers can see the status of every patient they’ve sent out, eliminating phone tag and guesswork.
- Receiving providers can track the status of every referral, see which need more documentation, and identify which sources are driving the most conversions.
- Patients can see when their referral was accepted, when it’s scheduled, and what to expect to pay – matching the “transparency we take for granted in food delivery or e-commerce.”
The Takeaway
Faxes are here to stay, and Tennr has $101M to make sure that they’re actually serving the practices using them. The plan isn’t to give healthcare a new AI tool, but to use AI to help the industry get more out of the tools it already has.
