How Startups are Fixing Healthcare Friction

Christophe Rimann (0:01)

Our goal is really to just turn healthcare insurance payments into something that looks like credit cards. And for some reason, for decades, we've just accepted that health insurance is not going to go through a similar flow.

Trey Holterman (0:12)

We have to have the controls that says, okay, now we know that we can benchmark qualifying a lab well enough, over 97%, that we're going to be able to roll this out to production. That's defensibility, that's happy customers.

Christophe Rimann (0:24)

If we use the latest fancy tooling to get slightly more efficient and slightly better outcomes, all they care about is that latter part, not the latest fancy tooling.

Trey Holterman (0:32)

The amount of time it takes them to first touch contact a patient that got sent in their way is 22 days. 22 days. And the average turnaround for us is 20 minutes.

David Haber (0:43)

What if the biggest lever for improving our health care system isn't clinical but operational? Hi, I'm David Haber, the General Partner and Andreessen Horowitz. In this episode recorded live at New York Tech Week, I sit down with Tennr Co-Founder Trey Holterman and Camber Co-Founder Christophe Rimann, both of whom are tackling some of the most entrenched, frustrating problems in health care. From broken referral handoffs to delayed or denied insurance claims, these aren't new issues, but they're increasingly solvable with better data, tech-enabled workflows and AI-powered tooling. We cover what it takes to build trust in high-stakes workflows like patient care and revenue cycle management, the difficult but critical 10% that separates enduring companies from shiny demos, the misunderstood cultural and operational strengths of regional health care providers. What both founders would fix first is they ran the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services or the Department of Health and Human Services. The episode wraps with hard-earned advice for aspiring founders in health care.

SPEAKER_4 (1:53)

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David Haber (2:23)

We'll kick things off with your founding story. Both of these founders are operating the health care space and building really interesting companies. I'm lucky enough to get to work with them very closely. As you guys each looked at the health care landscape, what was the one thing that was broken that got you guys to jump in and want to solve the problem?

Trey Holterman (2:38)

So for us, it's very simple. It's the fact that when a patient gets prescribed going from point A to point B, they actually only ever make it to the place they got sent under 50% of the time. So it's this very simple problem. My mom, who's on the family medicine side, would describe it as like the black hole problem. It's that there's this moment in time where you go from one provider to the next provider, nobody's really responsible for you in that time period. And it's like you get sent into a black hole. I learned about this just from angry group chats from my mom venting. And at some point you're like, oh wait a minute, that's like actually a pretty solvable problem, but it's subtle and hidden and you don't really hear about it until you actually dig in and say, what's going on there?

Christophe Rimann (3:15)

Yeah, I think similarly mine came from personal experience as well. I was diagnosed with ADHD in early college and so had to deal with my own healthcare journey. And I think most people who have had exposure to working with insurance companies for a while understand how difficult that can be. After grad school, I ended up becoming a healthcare consultant and got to see on the provider side exactly what's happening in the health insurance world and really wanted to be able to help providers get paid faster and easier and for less money. And so that was the impetus of founding this about four and a half years ago now.

David Haber (3:47)

One of the questions we always ask when we're making an investment is, what is the why now? And I know entrepreneurs often think about that as well when they're thinking of starting a company. What was the catalyst, what changed in the ecosystem maybe from a technology perspective that made Tennr and Camber possible?

Christophe Rimann (4:02)

It's interesting because we were founded before all the current trends in LMS and Gen AI were occurring. And so we were founded actually more around the thesis that health care was shifting to a more recurring model. So we started primarily in behavioral health at the beginning with the notion that behavioral health was seeing a lot of investment. This was in 2021 COVID was creating a massive spike in the amount of behavioral health care that was necessary. And so that was actually the initial thesis for us. And it was more data play. Hey, we can accumulate enough data to actually be able to understand insurance claims, submit really good insurance claims as a result of that. And then honestly, I would have to say over the past couple of years, all of these edge cases that we assumed from a margin perspective, we could handle manually. We really saw this accelerant where for all the edge cases, LMs have been a massive driver of value for us, whether that be our insurance operations, people literally just dumping massive amounts of claims data into LMs that we have internally all the way to we have services to read unstructured data. We have services to call payers automatically behind the scenes without a human in the loop. All that kind of stuff has been massively helpful.