Why You Never Get Your Doctor to Call You Back

Much of the conversation about AI in healthcare focuses on diagnosis and drug discovery or doctor-patient 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 much) that occurs between a primary care doctor writing a referral and a specialist’s office putting a patient on its schedule. It turns out that gap is huge, stubbornly manual, and increasingly attracting the interest of venture capitalists.

Kaled Alhanafi, a former Lyft and Cruise executive, and Chetan Patel, who spent a decade building heart devices at Medtronic, co-founded Basata after each one experienced the problem directly.

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

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 after a couple of weeks. Another responded after the surgery was already done. The third hasn’t called yet.

These are not unusual results, as almost anyone who has tried to see a specialist in recent years can attest. Specialty practices that receive referrals often process hundreds or thousands of documents (most arrive by fax) with small administrative teams. Practices lose patients not because they don’t want to see them, the company argues, but because they can’t overcome the delay in admission.

Basata, founded two years ago in Phoenix, is trying to solve this problem. When a referral arrives (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 office at any time and connect with an AI agent who can answer questions or handle common administrative needs, such as prescription renewals. Alhanafi says the company has recordings of patients audibly surprised by how quickly they are contacted after being sent a referral. The goal, he says, is for the patient to have an appointment scheduled when they get to their car in the parking lot after seeing their primary care doctor.

The company integrates with electronic medical records systems that actually use specific specialties, so it says it has acted carefully (first cardiology, then urology) rather than trying to serve all corners of the market at once. The founders say they recently turned down a big deal in a specialty they haven’t yet mapped thoroughly enough to feel confident they’ll get right.

The revenue model is usage-based: practices pay per document processed and per call answered, rather than per seat. The company says it has processed referrals for approximately 500,000 patients to date, with around 100,000 of those arriving 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 her career modeling the human brain as a PhD researcher before moving into corporate strategy at McKinsey and Dropbox and, eventually, investing. Cowboy Ventures, founded by Aileen Lee, also participated, as did Victoria Treyger, a former general partner at Felicis Ventures who recently created her own venture firm, Sofeon (this is her first investment).

The space is filling up. Tennr, a New York-based startup founded in 2021, has raised over $160 million to date, including Andreessen Horowitz, IVP, Lightspeed, and Google Ventures, and is now valued at $605 million. Tennr focuses heavily on document intelligence and says it has created proprietary language models trained on tens of millions of medical documents. Assort Health, backed by Lightspeed, focuses on automating phone communication with patients for specialty practices and last year earned a Valuation of 750 million dollars.

Lee said the founders’ years of experience are an advantage in a space that is full of well-funded competitors. “There are a lot of (VCs) going after high school and college dropouts, but when you sell to medical practices, trust is a big issue,” he said. “These doctors want to look you in the eyes and know they can count on you.”

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

Of course, like many AI companies that automate work humans do today, Basata will eventually face a tougher question about where the line is between augmenting workers and displacing them. For now, the founders say the management staff they work with aren’t worried about that; They are more worried about drowning. In fact, Alhanafi notes that administrative staff at specialty practices have often performed their roles for decades and know the job intimately; They are also buried in a volume that no reasonable number of hires could fully absorb.

Whether AI simply expands what these workers can do or gradually makes many of their functions unnecessary is a question that applies far beyond healthcare. For now, Basata’s speech is the first: that freeing managers from the most repetitive parts of the job makes them better at the rest. Judging by a statistic shared by Alhanafi (that 70% of the company’s new deals now come through word of mouth), it seems that those closest to the problem find that 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 chief technology officer.