Why you can never get your doctor to call you back

Much of the conversation around AI in healthcare is about diagnostics and drug discovery or doctor visits. But a less visible part of the system affects whether patients are actually seen, and it has less to do with the number of doctors in the world (too few) and more to do with the administrative work (too many) that takes place between a primary care physician writing a referral and a specialist’s office getting a patient on the schedule. That gap, it turns out, is enormous, stubbornly manual, and increasingly attracting serious interest from venture capitalists.

Kaled Alhanafi, a former Lyft and Cruise executive, and Chetan Patel, who spent a decade building cardiac equipment at Medtronic, are co-founders of Basata after everyone had experienced the problem directly.

For Patel, the issue became personal when his wife fainted during a flight with their young children. Even with his deep knowledge of cardiology and the specific devices that could help her, he says navigating the administrative process to get her the right care took much longer than it should have. “We have the best doctors, we have some of the best medicine, but the care gap is so wide,” he said.

Alhanafi describes a parallel experience with his own father, who was referred to three cardiology groups after a serious carotid diagnosis. According to Alhanafi, only one person called back within a few weeks. Another responded after the surgery had already been done. The third one still hasn’t called.

These are not unusual outcomes, as almost anyone who has tried to see a specialist in recent years can attest. Specialist practices that receive referrals often process hundreds or thousands of documents (most received by fax) with small administrative teams. Practices are not losing patients because they do not want to see them, the company argues, but because they cannot clear the inflow backlog.

Basata, founded two years ago in Phoenix, is trying to solve this. When a referral comes in – unfortunately still usually by fax – Basata’s system reads and processes the document, extracts the relevant clinical information, and then an AI voice agent calls the patient directly to schedule the appointment.

Patients can also call the practice at any hour and reach an AI agent who can answer questions or handle general administrative needs, such as prescription renewals. Alhanafi says the company has recordings of patients who are audibly surprised by how quickly they are contacted after a referral is sent. The goal, he says, is for a patient to have a scheduled appointment by the time he gets to his car in the parking lot after visiting his doctor.

The company integrates with the electronic medical record systems that specific specialties actually use. That’s why it says it has taken a cautious approach – first cardiology, then urology – rather than trying to serve all corners of the market at once. The founders say they recently turned down a major deal in a specialty they haven’t yet explored thoroughly enough to be sure they’re getting it right.

The revenue model is based on usage: practices pay per processed document and per completed conversation, instead of per seat. The company says it has processed referrals for about 500,000 patients to date, with about 100,000 coming in the past month alone.

Basata says it has raised a total of $24.5 million, including a new $21 million Series A round led by Lan Xuezhao of Basis Set Ventures, who started her career modeling the human brain as a PhD student before moving into business strategy at McKinsey and Dropbox and eventually into investing. Cowboy Ventures, founded by Aileen Lee, also participated, as did Victoria Treyger, a former general partner at Felicis Ventures, who recently launched her own venture Sofeon (this is its first investment).

The room is getting busy. 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 developed proprietary language models trained on tens of millions of medical documents. Assort Health, backed by Lightspeed, focuses on automating patient phone communications for specialty practices and was raised last year at a $750 million valuation.

Lee said the founders’ years of experience are an asset in a space filled with well-funded competitors. “There are many [VCs] they prey on high school and college dropouts, but when you sell to medical practices, trust is very important. These doctors want to look you in the eye and know they can count on you.’

Basata’s founders, meanwhile, argue that their differentiation lies in combining both capabilities into a single end-to-end workflow tailored to specific specialties, rather than building a tool that handles only one part of the process. That may be harder to sustain as better-funded competitors expand, but there’s clearly a market signal here.

Of course, Basata, like many AI companies that automate the work humans currently do, will eventually face a tougher question about where the line lies between augmenting workers and replacing them. For now, the founders say the administrative staff they work with isn’t concerned about that; they are more concerned about drowning. Alhanafi notes that the administrative staff of specialist practices have often been in their roles for decades and know the work inside and out; they are also hidden in a volume that no reasonable number of new hires could fully absorb.

Whether AI will merely expand the capabilities of these workers or gradually make many of their functions obsolete is a question that extends far beyond healthcare. For now, Basata’s argument is the former: that freeing administrators from the most repetitive parts of the job makes them better at the rest of the job. Judging by a figure shared by Alhanafi – that 70% of the company’s new deals now come through word of mouth – it seems the people closest to the problem find this argument compelling.

Pictured above, from left to right: Chetan Patel, co-founder and president of Basata; Kaled Alhanafi, CEO of the company; and Vivin Paliath, the company’s third co-founder and CTO.