Trey Holterman of Tennr, co-founder and chief executive officer, discusses the use of artificial intelligence agents to automate referral workflows and accelerate access to specialty care. Holterman explains Tennr’s engineering-led approach to automating specialty referrals and care coordination, with a patient-journey focus, enterprise deployments and the application of agentic AI and voice capabilities to shorten referral cycles and integrate payer guidelines and electronic medical record data; they emphasize practical, scalable solutions for mission-critical healthcare environments. John Furrier of theCUBE hosts the conversation as part of theCUBE Research coverage.
Key takeaways include Tennr’s mission to move patients from point A to point B by automating payer rules, records aggregation and scheduling. Holterman notes this workflow affects one in three U.S. patients. They report that Tennr reduces turnaround from weeks to minutes in many cases and grows to several hundred customers. theCUBE analysts and Furrier emphasize structured workflows, human-in-the-loop fallbacks and agent-based assembly line scaling for large-scale healthcare deployments.
Forgot Password
Almost there!
We just sent you a verification email. Please verify your account to gain access to
theCUBE + NYSE Wired: AI Agent Conference. If you don’t think you received an email check your
spam folder.
Sign in to theCUBE + NYSE Wired: AI Agent Conference.
In order to sign in, enter the email address you used to registered for the event. Once completed, you will receive an email with a verification link. Open this link to automatically sign into the site.
Register For theCUBE + NYSE Wired: AI Agent Conference
Please fill out the information below. You will recieve an email with a verification link confirming your registration. Click the link to automatically sign into the site.
You’re almost there!
We just sent you a verification email. Please click the verification button in the email. Once your email address is verified, you will have full access to all event content for theCUBE + NYSE Wired: AI Agent Conference.
I want my badge and interests to be visible to all attendees.
Checking this box will display your presense on the attendees list, view your profile and allow other attendees to contact you via 1-1 chat. Read the Privacy Policy. At any time, you can choose to disable this preference.
Select your Interests!
add
Upload your photo
Uploading..
OR
Connect via Twitter
Connect via Linkedin
EDIT PASSWORD
Share
Forgot Password
Almost there!
We just sent you a verification email. Please verify your account to gain access to
theCUBE + NYSE Wired: AI Agent Conference. If you don’t think you received an email check your
spam folder.
Sign in to theCUBE + NYSE Wired: AI Agent Conference.
In order to sign in, enter the email address you used to registered for the event. Once completed, you will receive an email with a verification link. Open this link to automatically sign into the site.
Sign in to gain access to theCUBE + NYSE Wired: AI Agent Conference
Please sign in with LinkedIn to continue to theCUBE + NYSE Wired: AI Agent Conference. Signing in with LinkedIn ensures a professional environment.
Are you sure you want to remove access rights for this user?
Details
Manage Access
email address
Community Invitation
Trey Holterman, Tennr
Trey Holterman of Tennr, co-founder and chief executive officer, discusses the use of artificial intelligence agents to automate referral workflows and accelerate access to specialty care. Holterman explains Tennr’s engineering-led approach to automating specialty referrals and care coordination, with a patient-journey focus, enterprise deployments and the application of agentic AI and voice capabilities to shorten referral cycles and integrate payer guidelines and electronic medical record data; they emphasize practical, scalable solutions for mission-critical healthcare environments. John Furrier of theCUBE hosts the conversation as part of theCUBE Research coverage.
Key takeaways include Tennr’s mission to move patients from point A to point B by automating payer rules, records aggregation and scheduling. Holterman notes this workflow affects one in three U.S. patients. They report that Tennr reduces turnaround from weeks to minutes in many cases and grows to several hundred customers. theCUBE analysts and Furrier emphasize structured workflows, human-in-the-loop fallbacks and agent-based assembly line scaling for large-scale healthcare deployments.
In this interview from the Mixture of Experts AI Agent Conference, Trey Holterman, co-founder and chief executive officer of Tennr, joins theCUBE's John Furrier to discuss how AI agents are eliminating the referral black hole that keeps patients from reaching specialty care. Holterman explains that one in three US patients receives a referral, yet the paperwork, payer hurdles and back-and-forth between providers create weeks of delay. Tennr treats the problem like a factory line, deploying reasoning models at specific points in a tightly structured workflow t...Read more
exploreKeep Exploring
Who is the customer for your product?add
How do you describe your product’s value proposition to providers — what problem does it solve and how do you sell it to them?add
Are non-deterministic AI use cases currently deployed in your healthcare workflows, or are they still a future/development area?add
What healthcare access problem is your business solving, and why does it matter?add
>> Welcome back, everyone, to theCUBE, here at our New York Stock Exchange studio. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. This is part of our NYSE Wired program, a CUBE original, also an open network here featuring the Agent Conference preview, Simon Chan's event that evolved from a community meetup to a full-blown industry conference where the builders, investors are all gathering, ushering in the wave of agents. And this is part of our Mixture of Expert series. Trey Holterman, co-founder and CEO of Tennr. Trey, great to see you. Thanks for coming in.>> Thanks for having me. Great to be here.
John Furrier
>> We were chatting. You're from the Bay Area, came to New York. The tech scene in New York's booming. This event, Agent Conference, that Simon's putting on, I'm super impressed. One, he's doing a great job marketing it, so I got to love the images he's putting out there, but it really speaks to the community of builders. It's pretty small community right now in terms of hardcore agentic infrastructure. What's your reaction to that? New York's obviously a big scene here as well as the Bay Area.>> I mean, I think we were told, look, if you move to New York, you're going to have all these different sacrifices we were going to have to make. But we knew at that time, we were software engineers when we started the business, we knew that every software engineer that was in our cohort that was on the forefront of this technology wanted to be out here. So, we really had no problem getting the builders that we wanted to to move out from SF to New York. Frankly, that's still probably more than half of the R&D team that we're hiring is folks that want to be in New York City.
John Furrier
>> Yeah, I just came in from the Palo Alto here with that studio, bringing the Silicon Valley vibe. I got to tell you, one of the things I see of entrepreneurs here is that they love New York because it's a great city. The tribe is here. There's been a migration. There's a total tech scene here, there's no debate about that. But the comments I hear are like, "I just take two subway stops when I got 20 customers within walking distance." I mean, the customer base is here too. I mean, Silicon Valley, they sell to each other, you get the tech companies, early-adopters, but here there's a huge enterprise base.>> I wish it was two stops on the subway for me. I'm in every state of America all the time, but that's-
John Furrier
>> I mean, it's a target-rich environment in New York.>> Totally. Totally. I mean, there's definitely big fertility customer base in New York City, so there definitely are providers out here.
John Furrier
>> All right. let's get into what you're working on. You guys got to growing business. Talk about the company, where you guys are at, what you guys do. Obviously AI in care is huge. You guys are solving a specific problem.>> Yeah, 100%. I mean, we are responsible for getting patients from point A to point B, where point B is specialty referrals and therapies. So, it turns out one in three patients in the US healthcare system are going to receive a referral. They need to go to a specialist or they need to get onto a therapy. The paperwork, the back and forth and the payer hurdles that come with that process create an insane amount of administrative work of ping ponging between patients and providers. We're one platform that streamlines all of that into a very smooth and elegant journey for the patients.
John Furrier
>> Well, I mean, first of all, the pain point everyone has been through, they've lived through it. One, the time, you got to get in, get the referral. The back office is crazy, you just laid that out. But just to the experience for the person.>> Totally. I mean, I think it looks more like putting together a legal case or going through a small legal case just to go and get specialty services that patients need. And so, it's no surprise that just like this agentic software is taking off in legal, I think we're seeing the same ROI in healthcare because it's really unstructured, really messy and just tons of really laborious work.
John Furrier
>> You mentioned legal. I mean, Harvey's doing an amazing job. You look at companies like Harvey, they're coming and nailing the verticals. Talk about who you guys sell to because AI really plays well in these domain-specific workflows.>> Yeah. I mean, we work with and sell to some of the largest health systems in the country, and also, just some of the largest independent providers in the country. I mean, if you're getting a device, a drug, a diagnostic, or if you're going to see specialists in orthopedics, in fertility, gastro, every-ology, you name it. Whether it's through a large health system that we all know the names of or independent providers, those are the folks that we're working with. They're trying to get their patients in the door and seeing their clinicians. It's just so much work they have to deal with, such a pain in the butt.
John Furrier
>> So, if people don't know how the healthcare structure is, who's the customer for you?>> Our customer is the provider. We sell a software platform to the provider that has either waitlists, or backlogs, or endless referral backlogs they're trying to get through, we help them get through and get to and get to-
John Furrier
>> And name a couple providers for reference.>> So, take like a Rothman Orthopaedics, a major orthopedic provider. And then, on the other side, take an AdaptHealth, a large device provider. These are some of the largest providers. Folks don't necessarily always know about them, but if you are getting a surgery or you're getting on a CPAP, you are probably working with one of those providers.
John Furrier
>> Okay. Now, take us through the AI agent solution here. What did you attack first? What was your thesis and what did you go after?>> I mean, we basically looked at it and we said, "It literally looks like the provider is going through a legal process where they are responsible for the burden of proof to justify why the patient needs the treatment, the therapy or the surgery or whatever it is." And our belief was if you can take payer guidelines, medical records, and where that patient's meant to go, and you can build a system that makes that work so fricking fast that patients can find out in real time, by the time they're in the parking lot, they're getting called and they're getting told that they have a clear path to treatment, that was the sell to providers and we've just grown from there.
John Furrier
>> Give us a feel for the momentum, customer base, growth, what's happening?>> We've grown to a few hundred customers over the last couple of years. We actually started the business in 2021 and a lot of our growth, we were just engineers. So, we didn't really know how to commercialize ourselves until the last couple of years and have really taken off since. We're one of the fastest growing companies in the Andreessen portfolio, and yeah, having fun.
John Furrier
>> What's been some of the reaction? Because the fact that you can get a referral as you're walking to your car, I mean, it's almost mind-blowing, magical. What's been the reaction because that's unheard of?>> Well, I think people have these grand ideas about how you're going to fix healthcare with this one symbol overlay that solves everything at once. Our view is if you can solve it for that one patient journey, that patient that's getting discharged from the hospital and needs to now get imaging and needs to go see an orthopedic consult, if you can just make that patient's journey feel incredibly tight, like a great consumer experience where they know that what their next appointment is, they know what it's going to cost, they know that they have everything, all the records that the provider needs to make sure they don't stick the patient with a bill are taken care of, that's what we think is like fixing the healthcare system. It's just creating an incredible consumer experience for patients. And that experience is happening all over the country right now and it's because of this technology. We're doing a couple of percentage points of all US patient visits and we think we're going to be double digits in the not so distant future.
John Furrier
>> It's awesome. And the thing about the times acceleration is interesting because AI is changing what gets done time-wise. Sometimes, what, six months to six hours, six years to six months. I mean, it's providing capabilities that were unfathomed prior.>> And you got to understand the infrastructure of this is usually a 300-page faxed packet that has 20 different patients on it, and that's what the administrators have to deal with today. And I had the CTO of Adapto, I was just hanging out with him. And he was like, "Trey, I can't believe it. Right now, we're going through and we're contacting all 25 patients sub four minutes on average." So, they're turning around these things that used to take literally weeks because you'd be missing documentation and be back and forth. Now, it's just a four-minute experience. So, the patient's in the parking lot, getting a phone call and knows they're on their way.
John Furrier
>> I love that you guys solve a specific problem, get into the market. I'm sure you guys sequencing to broader opportunities. What's some of those things that you guys are seeing now that you're in the adoption cycle and getting beachhead?>> I mean, people hate to hear this, but we are so insanely problem-obsessed. We need to solve this problem before we try to do a bunch of crazy other things. Everybody wants to be this and a little bit of that. No, somebody's got to be maniacally focused on getting patients from point A to point B, doing it effectively, making sure patients know what it's going to cost. And we think that more than half of healthcare isn't happening today because patients are falling into this referral black hole. And so, we just think everybody's grossly underestimated this market.
John Furrier
>> Yeah. So, you've got a lot more work to do in your mind. So->> We've got a massive amount of work to do. And if we do a great job and we get the job done, we'll go do something else-
John Furrier
>> Yeah, there's a lot of headroom.... >> but I think we got to solve this problem. There's a lot of room to go.
John Furrier
>> Yeah, it's a good thing to have. I mean, until that's over and then you move on to the next thing, you'll have that beachhead. All right. Talk about the agent pieces. I'm fascinated by how you're thinking about agents because everyone's trying to figure out agents. Obviously, healthcare there's a lot of identity, privacy involved and governance. Is that a factor at all or how do you guys think about how you're deploying agents?>> Yeah. I think the way that folks think about agents and talk about agents is often based on creative or generative productive work. A lot of what we do and what we think about is really more like factory line work. And what we think of is when you set up this factory line of how to process patients effectively, it should look like a tight supply chain operation. And we're looking at the agents really reasoning models and the different models that we're using at different points in times as machinery that operates on that factory line to accelerate the factory line. And we've been just astounded at how much more quickly we're able to build integrations into EMRs, this technology, how much we're able to add payer guidelines, expand into specialties. It's our development cycles accelerated dramatically. So, across the board, but fundamentally we have this like assembly line imagery and it's just allowed us to basically build better and better machinery on top of our assembly line.
John Furrier
>> So, you feel confident in the agents that you guys are deploying because you've nailed down, essentially, the workflow?>> Yeah, 100%. Yes.
John Furrier
>> Is that the case?>> Well, the reality is you've got the models, you've got the integrations and you've got the edge cases and everything in healthcare is an edge case. So, how you handle that and the nuances around that, you really want to be on structured rails. You want to have the productize, those differences of what happens when actually the patient already received an order to the exact same referring partner. That shouldn't be a probabilistic determination from an agent. That's structured rules that we can manage.
John Furrier
>> What about some of the non-deterministic use cases? Do Are they exist for you right now or is that more...>> The biggest one that really is ready... I mean, you have to also imagine that we're at the forefront, but also, when you're talking about walking a patient through a lifesaving treatment, you do not want to be at the forefront of the forefront. And we've finally seen conversational intelligence, voice AI get to a place that we're really comfortable to plug it into all of our workflows. And so, when I talk about that experience where we're getting that patient a phone call within four minutes of walking into that parking lot, now that is a Tennr voice AI phone call being made, connecting with the patient and the conversations there have just been incredible. We feel like that's commoditized and really, really been able to accelerate our product.
John Furrier
>> It's getting hard. And still there's some bleeding edge, as they say. I have to ask you, Trey, since you're an software engineer and your crew. As you look at some of the tech going on in agents, it's growing super fast, organically from the community, as well as there's some top-down demand on the business side and all these areas, like that you guys are doing. Are there things that you're comfortable with, like things around MCP, A2A? What's baked or what's stable, I should say? In your mind, for folks that are building out right now and want to jump into the fray, what's your view on this? And by the way, it's okay to have stuff continue to evolve, but you don't want to run mission-critical stuff on half-baked protocols or->> I mean, for us, we're so incredibly processed and workflow-centric as a business that we apply the same thing into our company and how we operate. My workflow relies upon a bunch of different data, so I absolutely have systems set up that are getting context from the right different systems that I need. That's working. It's working quite well and it's absolutely helping my workflows that are-
John Furrier
>> So, the data quality you mean?>> The data quality is really, really good. And we're actually able to learn something. I'm in every Slack channel, every deal channel, it's a little bit insane, but I can actually now find really good insights now through what's happening, where deals are moving and where they're not and whatnot. So, that I've been really, really impressed by. But more than that, really, it's just bottlenecks and workflows. And you look at our SDRs, our folks that are working to bring business into the company, there's so much work that they do that if you set up a process that takes the hardest or the longest part, like doing deep research on accounts and systematize, it's a little bit less like, "Hey, how good is this model in a reactive way?" And more like, "How can we structure a process so that they wake up and every day at 8:00 PM, the companies they're going to call, they understand deeply what they're struggling with."
John Furrier
>> All right. So, what's your view of the Agent Conference coming up in May? We're doing a little preview there. It's grown significantly, as I mentioned at the top. I mean, there's not a small event... A small event, Simon had a small community event. Now, it's getting bigger. Over-hyped, legit, feel good?>> We used to have a rule where you wouldn't be allowed to say AI at our company. You certainly weren't allowed to say agentic AI. And this was just a year and a half ago because there's so much hype, so much overblown and we said we want to talk about the models. We want to talk about how we're providing context to these models. We want to talk about the rule sets that those models are abiding by. The reality is though, we're in a place where more than half of the code at fast-moving software companies is being generated by agents that are operating in a manner where you're able to dispatch them on some of these smaller pull requests, some of these smaller bug fixes that you need and they're coming back. So, honestly, in a weird way, I can't believe it when Dario a year ago said that, "100% of all code..." I thought that was the most overblown, ridiculous thing I'd ever heard. But when you look at like it-
John Furrier
>> It seemed over the top, for sure.>> 100%. But I look at 80% of small bug fixes being assisted or being generated by AI on our side, you think, "Man, okay. This is actually going where a lot of folks have said it is."
John Furrier
>> I mean, the trust has to be there as you were talking about earlier. Talk about the trust equation. Delegation, trust. I mean, APIs were great. Hey, connect to an API, but now you have interactions, you have state, you have all kinds of things happening with agents, and that's a CS problem right there. It's a data problem, it's a state problem, trust.>> Pretty much all software was predicated on ones and zeros. This is either going to happen or it's not going to happen, and if this logic gate doesn't hit, it's going to go this down this fork. When you're dealing with probabilities, everything gets thrown to the wind. And when we qualify a patient and say, "Yes, they do in fact qualify for an imaging appointment based on their payer guidelines and based on their history," it's more like an ancient art, right? And you do want... If Tennr thinks, "Hey, we don't think this patient qualifies," you're going to have to call them and say they're missing records. We're going to have a human on their side, probably using the software, to be able to check and be able to validate that. And we're seeing that the amount of human-in-the-loop validations is coming down dramatically, but I still think for the next couple of years, software that's really leveraging this technology has to have human-in-the-loop fallbacks, edge case reviews. It's been table stakes. It's why we've been able to do-
John Furrier
>> I mean, it's classic. I mean, just look at the distribution of the outcomes. If you looked at the probability, you can knock down, with autonomy, with agents, the ones that clearly hurdle the requirements.>> 100%.
John Furrier
>> But then, there's going to be like, "Okay, where's that scan?" Or, "Where's that..." That's a human.>> Oh, 100%. And it's turning doers into reviewers and you just give them so much leverage, right? A lot of folks spend so much time calling payers because they have to call, check on the insurance. We realized, "Hey, you can just automate that call automatically, but pull in a transcript and the human can just double check the answers that the payers gave and keep them going."
John Furrier
>> All right, Trey, talk about the company, put a plug in. What are you working on? You guys are hiring. What's your focus area? What's your major to-do right now?>> The biggest thing is that we are a network business. So, we're across so many important specialties in the country. I think we are solving an incredible problem for some of the most important healthcare institutions in the country. And so, obviously, if you work at a provider that's struggling with two-month plus backlogs, patients trying to get into gastro, or neuro, or cardio, or whatever it is, just know that, frankly, there's incredible solutions out there like ours that have been built to solve those problems, get patients in and get seen.
John Furrier
>> We really appreciate what you're doing. We all have seen it and we've lived... I've personally seen it firsthand. Everyone I know has lived this. Getting the referral, wait times, 10 weeks from Sunday, maybe you can see someone. It's the worst.>> It's a real problem. It's a real problem. And the thing that we always come back to is like, "You know what? Do whatever." The business is thankfully growing like crazy, but even if it weren't, we're solving a real problem and we're just proud of that.
John Furrier
>> And it's not just time, it's the time also, if they have a condition, could get worse. It's just on the human care side, the consequences are significant than can be quantified.>> The amount of GI appointments that are dropped that would've found early-detected colon cancer screening are mind-blowing statistics, and this is true across all of our specialties. You got to get patients in the door. You got to get care. We have a big healthcare problem in this country, and one of the biggest issues is that we can solve a lot of these problems if we catch them early and folks aren't able to do that.
John Furrier
>> Well, Trey, good job. We appreciate you coming on theCUBE. Thanks a lot.>> I really appreciate you having me.
John Furrier
>> All right. Good job.
John Furrier
>> Thanks, John.
John Furrier
>> All right. Healthcare is one of the hottest areas, mainly because they have so much data, it's structured data, unstructured data, but that's where the action is. AI can make a big difference and we're seeing that vertical-specifically with AI light up and a lot of great value being created. We're doing our part bringing that to you here. Thanks for watching.
John Furrier