Why you can never get your doctor to call you back

Much of the talk about AI in healthcare focuses on diagnosis and drug discovery or on doctor-patient visits. But a less obvious part of the system affects whether patients are actually seen at all, and it’s less about the number of doctors in the world (too few) and more about the administrative work (too much) that goes on between the primary care doctor who writes a referral and a specialty office to get a patient on schedule. This gap has turned out to be huge, stubbornly manual, and attracting increasingly serious attention from venture capitalists.

Khaled Al-Hanafi, CEO and co-founder of Bassata, grew up in Jordan and came to the United States to study computer science. He spent five years at Lyft, where he eventually oversaw operations teams covering most of the country, and then went to Cruise, the self-driving car company, where he served as general manager for the Phoenix market. One of its founders, Chetan Patel, has a PhD in biomedical engineering with a focus in neuroscience and spent a decade at Medtronic building implantable cardiac devices. The two met in college and reconnected when their careers converged on the same problem.

For Patel, the case became personal when his wife fainted during a flight with their young children. Even with his in-depth knowledge of heart disease and the specific devices that can help it, he says going through the administrative process to get the right care for it took much longer than it should have. “We have the best doctors, we have some of the best medications, but the care gap is very wide,” he said.

Al-Hanafi describes a parallel experience with his father, who was referred to three cardiology groups after being diagnosed with carotid artery disease. According to Al-Hanafi, only one person called back in two weeks. Another responded after already having surgery. The third has not called yet

These are not unusual results, as almost anyone who has tried to see a specialist in recent years can attest. Specialty practices that receive referrals often process hundreds or thousands of documents – most of which arrive via fax – with small administrative teams. The company says practices are losing patients not because they don’t want to see them, but because they can’t get past the backlog of patients.

Passata, founded two years ago in Phoenix, is trying to fix this. When a referral comes in — and it’s usually by fax, unfortunately — Basata’s system reads and processes the document, extracts the relevant clinical information, and then an AI-powered voice agent contacts the patient directly to schedule an appointment.

Patients can also call the clinic at any hour and access an AI agent who can answer questions or handle common administrative needs such as prescription renewals. Al-Hanafi says the company has recordings of patients who were out loud surprised at how quickly they were contacted after sending a referral. The goal, he says, is for a patient to have a scheduled appointment by the time they get to their car in the parking lot after seeing their primary care doctor.

The company integrates with electronic medical record systems that specific specialties actually use, which is why it says it moved carefully — cardiology first, then urology — rather than trying to serve every corner of the market at once. The founders say they recently turned down a major deal in a niche they had not yet mastered enough to feel confident in performing well.

The revenue model is based on usage: practices pay per document processed and per call processed, not per seat. The company says it has processed referrals for about 500,000 patients so far, with about 100,000 coming in last month alone.

Basata says it has raised $24.5 million in total, including a new $21 million round led by Lan Cowboy Ventures, founded by Eileen Lee, also participated, as did Victoria Treasure, a former general partner at Felicis Ventures who recently founded her own investment firm, Sofeon (this is her first investment).

Space is getting more crowded. Tennr, a New York-based startup founded in 2021, has raised more than $160 million to date — including from Andreessen Horowitz, IVP, Lightspeed, and Google Ventures — and is now valued at $605 million. Tennr focuses heavily on document intelligence, and says it has built proprietary language models that have been trained on tens of millions of medical documents. Assort Health, backed by Lightspeed, focuses on automating patient phone communications for specialty practices and last year raised $750 million.

Lee said the founders’ years of experience are an asset in a space filled with well-funded competitors. “There are a lot of [VCs] “You go after high school and college dropouts, but when you’re selling to medical practices, trust is a really big deal. These doctors want to look you in the eye and know they can count on you,” she said.

Simplicity’s founders, meanwhile, see their difference in combining both capabilities into one comprehensive workflow tailored to specific disciplines rather than building a tool that handles only one part of the process. This may be difficult to sustain as better-funded competitors expand, but there is clearly a market signal here.

Of course, like many AI companies working to automate work currently done by humans, Simplicity will eventually face a tougher question about the line between increasing the number of workers and displacing them. For now, the founders say their administrative staff isn’t worried about that; They are more concerned about drowning. In fact, Al-Hanafi points out that managerial staff in specialist practices have often been in their roles for decades and know the work intimately; It is also buried in size so that a reasonable number of employees cannot accommodate it completely.

Whether AI merely expands what these workers can do or gradually makes many of their jobs unnecessary is a question that applies far beyond health care. For now, the simplicity proposition is first: that freeing administrators from the most repetitive parts of the job makes them better at the rest of the job. Judging by one statistic Al-Hanafi shared — that 70% of a company’s new deals now come through word of mouth — the people closest to the problem seem to find this argument compelling.

Pictured above, from left to right: Chetan Patel, co-founder and president of Basata; Khaled Al-Hanafi, CEO of the company; and Vivienne Baliat, the company’s third co-founder and CTO.