Why can’t you ever get your doctor to call you back?

Much of the talk about AI in healthcare has focused on diagnostics and drug discovery or doctor-patient visits. But the less visible part of the system affects how patients are actually seen, and that has less to do with the (too few) number of doctors in the world and (too much) the administrative work that happens between a primary care physician writing a referral and seeing a patient on a schedule. It turns out that this gap is huge, stubbornly manual, and attracting increasingly serious interest from venture capitalists.

Co-founded by former Lyft and Cruise executive Khaled Alhanafi and Chetan Patel, who spent a decade building cardiac devices at Medtronic. Simple After directly experiencing each problem.

For Patel, the issue became personal when his wife passed out on a plane with their young children. Even with an in-depth knowledge of cardiology and the special devices that can help him, he says it took longer than it should have to go through the administrative process to get him the care he needed. “We have the best doctors, we have the best drugs, but the care gap is very wide,” he said.

Alhanafi describes a parallel experience with his own father, who was referred to three cardiology teams after a serious carotid artery diagnosis. According to Alhanafy, only one called in several weeks. Another answered after the surgery was over. The third still hasn’t called.

These are not unusual results, as anyone who has tried to see a specialist in recent years can attest. Specialty practices that receive references often handle hundreds or thousands of documents—most of which are received by fax—with small administrative teams. The company claims that practices are losing patients not because they don’t want to see them, but because they can’t get through the backlog of appointments.

Founded in Phoenix two years ago, Basata is trying to fix that. When a referral comes in – still usually by fax, unfortunately – Basata’s system reads and processes the document, extracts the relevant clinical information, and then an AI voice agent calls the patient directly to set up an appointment.

Patients can call the practice at any hour and see an AI agent who can answer questions or handle general administrative needs like prescription updates. Alhanafi says the company has records of patients who were surprised at how quickly they were contacted after sending a referral. The goal, he said, is for a patient to have a scheduled appointment after seeing their primary care physician by the time they get to their car in the parking lot.

The company integrates with electronic medical record systems that specific specialties actually use, so it’s moving carefully — first cardiology, then urology — rather than trying to serve every corner of the market at once, he said. The founders say they recently turned down a big deal in a specialty they didn’t know enough to be sure they’d do well.

The revenue model is usage-based: practices pay per document processed and call viewed, not per seat. The company said it has processed applications for about 500,000 patients to date, with about 100,000 of them coming in the last month alone.

Basata said it has raised and invested $24.5 million in total, including a new $21 million Series A led by Lan Xuezhao of Basis Set Ventures, who started out modeling the human brain 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 launched her own venture firm, Sofeon (her first investment).

Space is getting tight. Founded in 2021, New York-based startup Tennr has raised over $160 million in funding to date, including from Andreessen Horowitz, IVP, Lightspeed and Google Ventures, and is currently valued at $100 million. 605 million dollars. Tennr focuses primarily on document mining and said it has built custom 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 last year worth 750 million dollars.

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

Basata’s founders, meanwhile, claim 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 manages only one part of the process. This may be harder to sustain as better-funded rivals expand, but there is clearly a market signal here.

Of course, like many AI companies automating jobs that humans currently do, Basata will eventually face the more difficult question of where the line is between adding employees and displacing them. For now, the founders say that the administrative staff they work with is not worried about it; they are more concerned about drowning. Indeed, Alhanafi notes that in specialty practices, administrative staff have often been in their roles for decades and know the business intimately; they are also buried in volumes that no reasonable number of wage-earners can fully absorb.

Whether AI simply expands what these workers can do or gradually makes many of their functions redundant is a question that has relevance beyond healthcare. For now, Basata’s position is the same: freeing managers from the most repetitive parts of the job makes them better at the rest. According to a statistic shared by Alhanafi – 70% of the company’s new deals now come from word of mouth – it seems that the people closest to the problem find this argument convincing.

Pictured above, 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 CTO.