What You Should Know:
– Tennr, a New York-based company that automates the messy, painful, manual work holding healthcare organizations back from seeing more patients, increasing revenue, and growing their business raises $18M in Series A funding led by a16z. The latest round brings Tennr’s total funding to over $25M.
– The company, founded by a team of Stanford graduates with expertise in machine learning, is tackling the problems caused by fax reliance in healthcare.
The Problem: Faxes Create Bottlenecks and Errors
Despite the rise of digital communication, the healthcare industry remains reliant on fax machines, sending a staggering 9 billion faxes annually. Faxes, though outdated, are seen as reliable for secure patient record exchange. This creates a cascade of issues:
- Time-consuming processes: Manual fax handling slows down workflows and delays patient care.
- Human error: Faxes are prone to errors during data entry, leading to claim denials and extra work.
- Burnout and turnover: Repetitive fax-related tasks contribute to employee frustration.
Tennr’s Solution: AI-Powered Processing for Faxes
Tennr has taken an unconventional approach to address this challenge: working with, not against, fax machines. Tennr’s solution integrates with existing healthcare workflows, including fax providers, on-premise file storage systems, and even outdated EHRs (Electronic Health Records) from the 1990s.
Here’s how it works:
- Automating Fax Processing: When a healthcare provider receives a fax (whether a referral, patient record, or audit request), Tennr extracts key information and automates the associated tasks.
- Faster Patient Scheduling: Tennr streamlines patient referrals by extracting crucial information from faxes and coordinating with patients for quicker scheduling. Incomplete referrals are automatically flagged, and missing information is requested.
- Reduced Insurance Denials: Tennr reads information from both healthcare providers and insurance companies, facilitating the exchange of accurate data to minimize claim denials and ensure faster payments.
- Improved Staff Efficiency: By automating manual tasks, Tennr reduces administrative burdens and frees up staff time for more critical tasks.
Tennr’s ability to read and process complex, unstructured data from faxes positions them well to tackle other challenges in healthcare data management. While fax automation remains the current focus, Tennr’s long-term vision is to leverage its technology to address a wider range of healthcare inefficiencies.
“When building Tennr and this healthcare integration, we looked at what’s actually needed and saw what was possible with technology. Our number one integration today is across fax providers, on-prem file storage systems and EHRs from the 90s. And this is the real life need of the industry. But beyond that, what people miss the most in all of this is that it’s not about just automating work or making teams faster. Lots of people can build tools that make admins marginally faster–that just doesn’t move the needle. Instead, our research team is building models based around this very complex information flow, being able to parse it for one practice at a time, and then do the work so well that you can turn it into very clear growth for a business. And yes, the e-fax ends up being in the middle of it all,” said Trey Holterman, CEO and co-founder of Tennr.
