Why can’t I get my doctor to call me back?

Many conversations about AI in healthcare focus on diagnostics and drug discovery or doctor-patient visits. But the less visible parts of the system that affect whether patients actually get care have less to do with the number of doctors in the world (too few) and more to do with the administrative work that occurs between primary care physicians who write referrals and the specialist’s office that sees patients on schedule (too many). The gap is enormous, stubbornly passive, and increasingly of serious concern to venture capitalists.

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

For Patel, the issue became personal when his wife fainted while on a plane ride with their young child. He says that despite his deep knowledge of cardiology and the specific devices that could have helped her, going through the administrative process to get proper care took much longer than expected. “We have the best doctors and the best medicines, but the treatment gap is too big,” he said.

Alhanafi describes a similar experience with his own father, who was referred to three cardiology groups after being diagnosed with a serious carotid artery. Within a few weeks, only one person called back, according to Alhanafi. Another person responded after surgery had already been completed. The third hasn’t called yet.

As almost anyone who has tried to see a professional in recent years can attest, this is not an unusual finding. Referral professional work often involves handling hundreds or thousands of documents (many of which arrive by fax) with a small management team. The company claims that clinics lose patients not because they don’t want to see them, but because they can’t handle the backlog.

Basata, founded in Phoenix two years ago, is trying to solve this problem. When a referral comes in (still typically via fax), Basata’s system reads and processes the document, extracts relevant clinical information, and then an AI voice agent calls the patient directly to schedule an appointment.

Patients can also call the office at any time to contact an AI agent who can answer questions or handle general care needs, such as renewing a prescription. Alhanafi said the company has recordings of patients who are amazed at how quickly they hear back from them after their referrals are sent. The goal, he says, is to have scheduled appointments between the time a patient sees their primary care physician and the time they get to their car in the parking lot.

The company says it moves cautiously, first in cardiology and then in urology, rather than trying to serve every corner of the market simultaneously, as it integrates the electronic medical records systems actually used by specific specialties. The founders said they recently turned down a large deal in a specialty they hadn’t mapped thoroughly enough to feel confident they were doing well.

The revenue model is usage-based. This means that we pay per document processed and per call processed rather than per seat. The company said it has processed referrals for about 500,000 patients to date, with about 100,000 coming in the past 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, who began his career modeling the human brain as a PhD researcher before moving into corporate strategy at McKinsey and Dropbox. Cowboy Ventures, founded by Aileen Lee, also participated, as did Victoria Treyger, a former general partner at Felicis Ventures who recently founded her own venture firm, Sofeon (this is her first investment).

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

Lee said the founders’ years of experience are an asset in a space filled with deep-pocketed competitors. “There are a lot of (VCs) going after high school dropouts and college dropouts, but when you’re selling to the medical community, trust is really important,” she said. “These doctors look you straight in the eye and want you to know they can trust you.”

Meanwhile, Basata’s founders argue that differentiation lies in combining 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 more difficult to sustain as better-funded competitors expand, but there are certainly market signals here.

Of course, like many AI companies that automate tasks currently performed by humans, Basata will eventually face harder questions about where the line lies between employee augmentation and replacement. For now, the management staff they work with aren’t worried about this, the founders say. They’re more worried about drowning. In fact, Alhanafi points out that administrative staff in specialty practices have often been in their roles for decades and know their jobs well. It is also buried in quantities that cannot be fully absorbed by a reasonable number of employees.

Whether AI simply expands the tasks these workers can do or gradually makes many functions redundant is a question that extends beyond healthcare. Basata’s current argument is the former. The idea is that managers can get away from the most repetitive parts of their work and achieve better results in the rest. According to one statistic Alhanafi shared, 70% of the company’s new deals now come through word of mouth, and those closest to the matter seem to find that argument compelling.

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