Startup seeking to simplify medical imaging referrals raises $101M
A startup seeking to simplify referrals for radiology and other care has raised $101 million in Series C financing, leaders announced Wednesday.
Tennr notes that about one-third of Americans are referred for imaging, equipment or other specialty care. However, for radiologists on the receiving end, it can be “impossible” to deliver an ideal patient experience, due to the need for manual review of email, electronic medical records, and fax requests.
New York-based Tennr seeks to address this by automating processing for referral-based care. They utilize an “enterprise orchestration engine” and series of specialized language models, trained on the nuances of processing medical documentation against payer criteria.
"Forcing healthcare providers to change the way they refer their patients doesn't work. Many have tried,” Zeya Yang, partner at IVP, a Menlo Park, California-based venture capital firm that led the funding round, said in a statement. “Tennr is the first company that works the way healthcare already does: no EMR rip-outs, no need to retrain providers, no changes to how documentation is shared. By combining deep customer empathy for specialist workflows with technical excellence, Tennr builds software that actually gets used because it works with the system, not against it.”
Existing investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed, GV, ICONIQ, Foundation Capital, and Frank Slootman also are investing in the startup. Tennr said it has now helped process “millions” of patient referrals across hundreds of providers, more than tripling revenue since its Series B two years ago. It also is launching the “Tennr Network,” a “coordination layer” that allows radiologists and other specialists to track the status of referrals, see which require more documentation, and identify referral sources that drive the most conversions.
Tennr was founded in 2021 by engineers Trey Holterman, Diego Baugh, and Tyler Johnson, who met at Stanford University. Holterman said he learned about the referral maze “black hole” from his mother, who was working in family medicine at the time. Baugh also experienced it personally as a patient after a six-week delay between GI appointments sent him to the emergency room in college.
“Patients really shouldn't vanish into a work queue," Holterman said in the announcement. "There's so much opportunity to build a delightful patient experience, but it's always failed because we expect so much behavior change from providers who are completely overwhelmed.”
Marty Stempniak has covered healthcare since 2012, with his byline appearing in the American Hospital Association's member magazine, Modern Healthcare and McKnight's. Prior to that, he wrote about village government and local business for his hometown newspaper in Oak Park, Illinois. He won a Peter Lisagor and Gold EXCEL awards in 2017 for his coverage of the opioid epidemic.