Why my doctor won’t call me back

Many conversations about AI in healthcare focus on diagnostics, drug discovery, or doctor-patient visits. But a less visible part of the system influences whether patients actually get seen, and it has less to do with the number of doctors in the world (too few) than with the paperwork involved between a primary care physician writing a referral and a specialist’s office seeing a patient on time (too much). It turns out that this gap is huge, stubbornly manual, and increasingly attracting serious interest from venture capitalists.

Khaled Alhanafi, a former Lyft and Cruise executive, and Chetan Patel, who spent a decade making cardiac devices at Medtronic, co-founded Basata after each experienced the problem first-hand.

For Patel, the issue became personal when his wife passed out on a plane with their young children. Even with his deep knowledge of cardiology and the specific equipment that could help her, he says it took him longer than necessary to navigate the administrative process to get her the right treatment. “We have the best doctors and some of the best medicine, but the health care disparities are just too great,” he says.

Alhanafi describes a similar experience with her own father, who was referred to three cardiology groups after a severe carotid artery diagnosis. Alhanafi said only one person called back within a few weeks. The other person reacted after the surgery was already over. The third person has not received a phone call yet.

These are not uncommon findings, as nearly everyone who has sought medical attention in recent years can attest. The professional practices we receive frequently process hundreds or thousands of documents (most of which arrive by fax) with small management teams. The company argues that clinics lose patients not because they don’t want to be seen, but because they can’t overcome the backlog.

Basata, founded two years ago in Phoenix, is trying to solve this problem. Once a referral arrives (sadly, still usually by fax), Basata’s system reads and processes the document, extracting relevant clinical information, and then an AI voice agent calls the patient directly to schedule an appointment.

Patients can also call the clinic at any time and connect with an AI agent who can answer questions and help with common administrative needs like renewing prescriptions. Alhanafi said the company has recordings of patients who are surprised at how quickly they are contacted after a referral is sent. The goal, he said, is to allow patients to schedule an appointment by the time they leave their doctor’s appointment and get to their car in the parking lot.

Rather than trying to serve every corner of the market at once, the company said it has made a deliberate transition first to cardiology and then urology, as it integrates with the electronic medical record systems that specific specialties actually use. The founders said they have recently turned down large deals in areas of expertise that have not yet been mapped thoroughly enough to be confident they are doing well.

The revenue model is usage-based. You pay per document processed and per call processed, not per seat. The company says it has processed about 500,000 patient referrals to date, of which about 100,000 came in the last month alone.

Basata said 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. She started her career modeling the human brain as a doctoral researcher, then worked in corporate strategy at McKinsey and Dropbox, and eventually in investments. Cowboy Ventures, founded by Eileen Lee, also participated, as did Victoria Traeger, a former general partner at Felicis Ventures who recently launched her own venture firm, Sopheon (the firm’s first investment).

The space is getting crowded. Tennr is a New York-based startup founded in 2021 that has raised more than $160 million to date, including funding from Andreessen Horowitz, IVP, Lightspeed, and Google Ventures, and is currently valued at $605 million. Tennr focuses on document intelligence and says it has built a proprietary language model trained on tens of millions of medical documents. Lightspeed-backed Assort Health focuses on automating patient phone communications in specialty practices and was raised last year at a $750 million valuation.

Mr Lee said the founders’ years of experience were an asset in a field filled with well-funded competitors. “There are a lot of VCs that go after high school dropouts and college dropouts, but when you’re selling to the medical field, trust is very important,” she says. “These doctors want to look you in the eye and know that they can trust you.”

Basata’s founders, on the other hand, argue that their differentiation lies in integrating both capabilities into a single end-to-end workflow tailored to specific areas of expertise, rather than building a tool that handles only one part of the process. This may be difficult to sustain as better-funded competitors expand, but there are clear market signals here.

Of course, like many AI companies that automate tasks currently performed by humans, Basata will eventually face the harder question of where the line is between augmenting and replacing workers. For now, the founders say the administrative staff they work with isn’t worried about that. They are more worried about drowning. In fact, Alhanafi points out that administrative staff at specialty clinics have often been in the role for decades and know the job well. It is also buried in a quantity that cannot be fully absorbed by a reasonable number of jobs.

The question of whether AI will simply augment what these workers can do or gradually make many of their functions redundant applies beyond healthcare. So far, Basata’s argument is the former, that by freeing administrators from the most repetitive parts of their jobs, they can do the rest better. Judging from one statistic Alhanafi shared (70% of the company’s new business now comes through word of mouth), those closest to the problem seem to find the argument persuasive.

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