Why can’t you get your doctor to call you again

Much of the discussion surrounding AI in healthcare focuses on diagnostics and drug discovery or doctor-patient visits. But the most invisible 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 the administrative work (too many) that occurs between the primary care physician who writes the referral letter and the specialist office that receives the patient in the system. That gap, it turns out, is large, stubborn, and increasingly attracting the interests of capitalists trying to make ends meet.

Kaled Alhanafi, a former Lyft and Cruise executive, and Chetan Patel, who spent a decade building cardiac devices at Medtronic, founded Basata after each experienced this problem firsthand.

For Patel, the story became his own when his wife passed out on a plane along with their young children. Even with her deep knowledge of heart disease and some tools to help her, she says navigating the administrative system to get her the right care took longer than it should have. “We have the best doctors, we have some of the best medicine, but the care gap is huge,” he said.

Alhanafi describes a similar experience with his father, who was transferred to three cardiac units after a critical carotid artery diagnosis. According to Alhanafi, only one returned after a few weeks. One responded after the operation had already been performed. The third one hasn’t called yet.

These are not unusual results, as almost anyone who has tried to see a specialist in recent years can testify. Special procedures that receive referrals often process hundreds or thousands of documents – most of which arrive by fax – by small administrative teams. Practices are losing patients not because they don’t want to see them, the company argues, but because they can’t get past the backlog.

Basata, founded two years ago in Phoenix, is trying to fix this. When a referral comes in — usually by fax, alas — the Basata system reads and processes the text, extracts the relevant clinical information, and an AI voice agent calls the patient directly to schedule an appointment.

Patients can also call the practice at any hour and reach an AI agent who can answer questions or handle routine administrative needs like renewing a prescription. Alhanafi says the company has records of patients who have been audibly surprised at how quickly they were contacted after a referral was made. The goal, he says, is for the patient to have an appointment when they get to their car in the parking lot after seeing their primary care physician.

The company also includes electronic medical record systems that are used exclusively, which is why it says it has gone carefully – cardiology first, then urology – rather than trying to offer all rooms of the market at once. Founders say they’ve recently turned down a big specialty they haven’t mapped enough to feel confident they’re doing it right.

The revenue model is based on usage: payment processes per document processed and call made, instead of per seat. The company says it has processed about 500,000 patient referrals so far, about 100,000 of those coming in the last month alone.

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 his career modeling the human brain as a PhD researcher before moving on to venture capital at McKinsey and Dropbox and eventually venture capital. Cowboy Ventures, founded by Aileen Lee, also participated, as did Victoria Treyger, a former general partner at Felicis Ventures who recently started her own company, Sofeon (this is her first investment).

The space is crowded. 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 specializes in document intelligence and claims to have built formal language models trained on tens of millions of medical documents. Assort Health, backed by Lightspeed, focuses on automated patient phone communication for specialty practices and last year raised $750 million in revenue.

Lee said the founders’ years of experience are useful in a space full of well-funded competitors. “There are many [VCs] chasing high school dropouts and college dropouts, but when you’re selling medicine, trust is a really big thing.” These doctors want to look you in the eye and know they can trust you.”

Meanwhile the founders of Basata say that their difference lies in combining both of these skills into a single end-to-end application designed for specific skills instead of building a tool that manages only one part of the process. That may be hard to sustain as better-funded competitors grow, but there’s clearly a market signal here.

Of course, like many AI companies that are currently doing the work that humans do, Basata will eventually face a difficult question about where the line is between raising employees and firing them. For now, the founders say their co-workers aren’t worried about that; they are more concerned about drowning. Indeed, Alhanafi notes that administrative staff in special operations have often been part of them for decades and know the work intimately; they are reburied at a rate that no reasonable amount of rent can fully absorb.

Whether AI simply augments what these workers do or gradually makes many of their jobs redundant is a question that extends beyond healthcare. For now, Basata’s pitch is the first: that freeing managers from repetitive parts of the job makes them better in the end. Judging by one statistic shared by Alhanafi – that 70% of the company’s new deals are now word of mouth – it seems that people closest to the issue find the argument convincing.

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