Why Patients Wait 30 Days for Follow-Ups | Trey Holterman

Trey Holterman (0:00)

We have a network of more than 430,000 referring providers, and the thousands of receiving providers that are treating these patients that are going from there. We're trying to make everything as frictionless as possible. We'll get more patients from A to B that need to go there and try to clear out these horrifying backlogs. I mean, hey, look, I was just in Arizona, sitting, you know, with this large group, and it's like, these patients aren't getting contact for 30 days.

Sophia (0:24)

Hello everyone, and welcome back to MTS. I am here today with Trey Holterman, who is the CEO at Tennr. He is our second guest at the day, and pretty exciting day, because we're going to do a lot of from the New York Stock Exchange.

Trey Holterman (0:36)

Yeah, totally. It's great to be here. Thank you for having me.

Sophia (0:38)

It's a great day. It's a great day. I'm so excited to have Trey here, because with the stuff that he's working on at Tennr, he really gets to understand what's happening with patient orchestration in the healthcare world. And I think our audience is super curious to better understand where AI is affecting the healthcare world, specifically when it comes to agents, what are agents' role in it. So it's going to be a great conversation. Thank you again for joining us.

Trey Holterman (1:00)

Totally happy to be here. One of our early investors in 2024 basically said we were the really first agentic healthcare application to be running at scale. And so we get a really good nice insight into the difference between how we see the tech being adopted in companies like us versus in real healthcare providers day in and day out. It's very different.

Sophia (1:20)

I didn't realize you guys were one of the first. When you say agentic, because that word kind of gets used a little bit as an umbrella term. Sometimes it just means automation. Sometimes it means fully agents from end to end. What did that mean back in 2024 when you guys started? What does that kind of mean today?

Trey Holterman (1:33)

So we didn't get to start in 24, but basically we think of it as whenever there's multiple steps of non-deterministic reasoning that are being tied together leading to an end outcome. And so fundamentally, when we think about what does it take to actually get a patient through onto a complex therapy treatment device or even just a first appointment, there's a series of steps and each one of those steps requires judgment, requires thinking, requires rule, requires tool use. And so being able to put that on rails was how we sort of defined some of the first agentic use cases.

Sophia (2:03)

What's the origin story behind this? So how did you identify that this was something that needed to be solved?

Trey Holterman (2:07)

Yeah, so it goes back to in the Bay Area, while I was in college, my mother was basically complaining that every time she sent a patient out of family practice, it felt like she was sending them into a black hole. And it's a very, very weird thing that if you would send a patient out, they wouldn't be getting handled because that patient is going to be ultimately the life of the business for an imaging center, an oncology practice. And so we went over to those businesses and said, what actually happens? Where do these patients fall through the cracks? And that was literally how we got started, just trying to figure out why were the patients that she would send out fall to the cracks and nobody was contacting them.

Sophia (2:40)

So you grew up kind of in this whole space, your mom works in this space, you've gone to see it firsthand about what's happening. Tell me more about all of that as well.

Trey Holterman (2:50)

Yeah, I mean, I think one of the things that we lean in is really a sort of a tenet is that when you look at a health care operation, we're looking at the sort of ugliest, hardest, most complex environment to let these systems run. And when you compare that to, you know, my background is a software engineer, where writing code and we're really in a closed loop environment where we can test everything that we do, we can see the input and outputs of it. And so trying to wrangle the complexity of that, I think is, it's an experience that just makes you look at the technology very differently and makes you, you know, get really excited about everything you're seeing, but also always hit with a real dose of reality of like, how can this actually drive, you know, an incremental percentage and conversion of patient experiences, stuff like that.