Fixing Healthcare’s Referral Black Hole w/ Trey Holterman, Co-Founder & CEO, Tennr

Every day in healthcare, a referral goes out and a patient disappears. Into the fax, into the queue, into someone's pile. The specialist then never calls back. The primary care doctor never hears what happened. And the patient is left in limbo, wondering if they've been forgotten. Trey Holterman watched his mom, a family physician, live with this for years. So he built a company and even a proprietary AI model to fix it. Welcome back to Humanify Health Tech, where we explore how AI is rewriting the rules of healthcare and putting people back at the center where they belong. I'm Brian Chee, Senior Director of Content and Communications at NetHealth, and I'll be filling in for our host, Francesca Verrett. I have big shoes to fill, so I'm treating this like value-based care, aiming to deliver good outcomes, but with limited resources. Speaking of outcomes, today's guest built one of healthcare AI's fastest growing companies around a problem everyone in and out of this industry has experienced. The referral that goes nowhere, or as our guest likes to put it, the patient referral black hole. Trey Holterman Trey is a Stanford graduate, one of Forbes' top founders in AI, and has raised $162 million in under two years. Tenor now processes 10 million healthcare documents a month and works with hundreds of organizations across the country. And I have heard that you process 10% of all Americans. Trey, is that true?

Yeah, that's right. And on the sending side, we're in 314,000 providers now across the country and 89.7% of counties. So hoping to get to 90% before the weekend. That's amazing. All

right. So before we get into Tenor, I want to talk to you about you. Stand-up comic, captain of the Stanford crew, founder, engineer... Okay, make that make sense for me. Talk to me about how such a diverse background has informed what you do today as a leader.

Man, I appreciate it. I would say it's like in Finding Nemo when they go to the dad, Marlon, and they're like, oh, you're a clownfish. Say something funny. Tell somebody you did a couple years of stand-up and a couple years of improv before that. To be honest, it's more just an obsession that was bore out of some really harsh feedback I got from somebody that said, it was actually a manager when I was an intern, and she said, look, if you want to speak in front of the company again, you better take some public speaking And so I was just researching what's the best way to get really snappy and better at public speaking. And I tried to take it to its logical conclusion with just open mics and open mic and open mic. you start getting addicted to the rejection of that and you start doing it a lot. And so, and then honestly, similarly in rowing, um, and making that, you know, a big part of my life, I was frankly, uh, just a little bit of a overweight kid. And my mom was the most healthy person you can imagine. I used to like to joke that she just didn't want to take her work home with her. And, uh, so I was, uh, you know, probably 14. And I was frankly just trying to get really, really fit. And, you know, so I tried to take rowing to its logical conclusion and be the best that I could be at, at every stage. So I