Tennr Adds Voice AI to Automate Patient Referral Phone Calls

The new feature enables provider front-office teams to automate and manage multiple phone calls simultaneously within Tennr’s system, according to the company.

Health tech startup Tennr has added voice artificial intelligence capabilities to its referral automation platform, targeting time-intensive routine phone calls that slow down the pre-visit process for specialty care providers.

The new feature enables provider front-office teams to automate and manage multiple phone calls simultaneously within Tennr’s system, according to the company. These calls include payer benefits investigations, documentation follow-ups, patient welcome and order confirmations, and resupply outreach tied to active referrals. Executives said the embedded voice AI tool allows providers to increase patient throughput without proportionally increasing headcount.

Founded in 2021, Tennr focuses on automating the manual and fragmented patient referral process. Referrals from primary care physicians often arrive via fax, email, or electronic portals and require extensive documentation review and follow-up. Industry professionals frequently describe gaps in this process as the “black hole problem,” where patients fall out of the system due to a lack of visibility and coordination.

Tennr built proprietary language models to read referrals, extract relevant clinical and administrative information, and route cases appropriately. Its vision-language model, RaeLM, is trained on 100 million anonymized healthcare documents, 2.3 billion data fields, and 8,000 criteria sets, according to the company. RaeLM evaluates documentation against payer requirements to flag potential denials and reduce submission errors.

The company says it processes more than 10 million documents per month and works with over 150 healthcare organizations.

CEO Trey Holterman said voice was added after identifying phone-based workflows as a major bottleneck. “We can tell when a patient is missing valid insurance information within two minutes of receiving that order or referral,” Holterman said. “But going out and getting that information relied on manual processes. It was a logical next step to bring in automated phone calls integrated directly into that workflow.”

Tennr raised $101 million in a Series C funding round in June to expand its platform. Since then, it has added products focused on eligibility benefits, billing qualification, communication coordination, authorization review and patient experience. The company has also expanded into orthopedics, cardiology and fertility and appointed physician leader William Morris, M.D., as chief medical officer to support specialty growth.

Holterman said embedding voice AI into existing workflows, rather than offering it as a standalone solution, is central to the company’s approach to solving referral inefficiencies.

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