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A lot of the conversation around AI in healthcare focuses on diagnostics and drug discovery or on doctor-patient visits. But a less visible part of the system affects whether patients actually get seen at all, and it has less to do with the number of doctors in the world (too few) and more with the administrative work (too much) that happens between a primary care doctor writing a referral and a specialist\u2019s office getting a patient on the schedule. That gap, it turns out, is huge, stubbornly manual, and increasingly attracting serious interest from venture capitalists.<\/p>\n
Kaled Alhanafi, a former Lyft and Cruise executive, and Chetan Patel, who spent a decade building cardiac devices at Medtronic, co-founded Basata<\/a> after each experienced the problem directly.<\/p>\n For Patel, the issue became personal when his wife fainted on 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 appropriate care took far longer than it should have. \u201cWe have the best doctors, we have some of the best medicines, but the care gap is just so wide,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Alhanafi describes a parallel experience with his own father, who was referred to three cardiology groups after a serious carotid artery diagnosis. According to Alhanafi, only one called back within a couple of weeks. Another responded after the surgery was already done. The third still hasn\u2019t called.<\/p>\n These aren\u2019t unusual outcomes, as nearly anyone who has tried to see a specialist in recent years can attest. Specialty practices that receive referrals are frequently processing hundreds or thousands of documents \u2014 most arriving by fax \u2014 with small administrative teams. Practices lose patients not because they don\u2019t want to see them, the company argues, but because they can\u2019t get through the intake backlog.<\/p>\n Basata, founded two years ago in Phoenix, is trying to fix this. When a referral comes in \u2014 still typically by fax, alas \u2014 Basata\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n Patients can also call the practice at any hour and reach an AI agent that can answer questions or handle common administrative needs like prescription renewals. Alhanafi says the company has recordings of patients audibly surprised by how quickly they\u2019re contacted after a referral is sent. The goal, he says, is for a patient to have a scheduled appointment by the time they reach their car in the parking lot after seeing their primary care doctor.<\/p>\n Techcrunch event<\/p>\n \n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tSan Francisco, CA<\/span> The company integrates with the electronic medical record systems that specific specialties actually use, which is why it says it has moved carefully \u2014 cardiology first, then urology \u2014 rather than trying to serve every corner of the market at once. The founders say they recently turned down a large deal in a specialty they haven\u2019t yet mapped thoroughly enough to feel confident doing well.<\/p>\n The revenue model is usage-based: practices pay per document processed and per call handled, rather than per seat. The company says it has processed referrals for roughly 500,000 patients to date, with about 100,000 of those coming in the last month alone.<\/p>\n Basata says it has raised $24.5 million in total, including a new $21 million Series A round led by Lan Xuezhao of Basis Set Ventures, who began her career modeling the human brain as a PhD researcher before moving into corporate strategy at McKinsey and Dropbox and ultimately into investing. Cowboy Ventures, founded by Aileen Lee, also participated, as has Victoria Treyger, a former general partner at Felicis Ventures who more recently stood up her own venture firm, Sofeon (this is its first investment).<\/p>\n The space is getting crowded. Tennr, a New York-based startup founded in 2021, has raised over $160 million to date \u2014 including from Andreessen Horowitz, IVP, Lightspeed, and Google Ventures \u2014 and is now valued at $605 million<\/a>. Tennr focuses heavily on document intelligence and has says it has built proprietary language models trained on tens of millions of medical documents. Assort Health, backed by Lightspeed, focuses on automating patient phone communication for specialty practices and last year raised at a $750 million valuation<\/a>.<\/p>\n Lee said the founders\u2019 years of experience are an asset in a space filling up with well-funded competitors. \u201cThere are a lot of [VCs] chasing around high school dropouts and college dropouts, but when you\u2019re selling to medical practices, trust is a really big deal,\u201d she said. \u201cThese doctors want to look you in the eye and know that they can count on you.\u201d<\/p>\n Basata\u2019s founders meanwhile argue that their differentiation lies in combining both capabilities into a single end-to-end workflow tailored to specific specialties instead of building a tool that handles just one part of the process. That may be harder to sustain as better-funded competitors expand, but there\u2019s clearly a market signal here.<\/p>\n Of course, like many AI companies automating work that humans currently do, Basata will eventually face a harder question about where the line is between augmenting workers and displacing them. For now, the founders say the administrative staff they work with aren\u2019t worried about that; they\u2019re more worried about drowning. Indeed, Alhanafi notes that the administrative staff at specialty practices have often been in their roles for decades and know the work intimately; they\u2019re also buried in volume that no reasonable number of hires could fully absorb.<\/p>\n Whether AI merely expands what these workers can do or gradually makes many of their functions unnecessary is a question that applies well beyond healthcare. For now, Basata\u2019s pitch is the former: that freeing administrators from the most repetitive parts of the job makes them better at the rest of it. Judging by one stat shared by Alhanafi \u2014 that 70% of the company\u2019s new deals now come through word of mouth \u2014 it seems the people closest to the problem find that argument convincing.<\/p>\n Pictured above, left to right: Chetan Patel, who is co-founder and president of Basata; Kaled Alhanafi, the company\u2019s CEO; and Vivin Paliath, the company\u2019s third co-founder and CTO. <\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission<\/a>. This doesn\u2019t affect our editorial independence.<\/em><\/p>\n
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