Why this Cleveland Clinic doctor is working at an AI startup now

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William Morris has had a lot of jobs: hospitalist, chief innovation officer at Cleveland Clinic, chief medical officer (CMO) at both Google Cloud and AI scribe company Ambience.

But Morris has a new gig as of January: CMO at health tech Tennr, which is using AI to streamline documentation and prior authorization, automate referrals, and prevent denials. The company was valued at $605 million after its most recent $101 million Series C fundraise in June.

Morris spoke with Healthcare Brew about why he joined a startup after years in legacy healthcare and why he’s excited about Tennr’s technology.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What stood out to you about Tennr?

I’m a hospitalist by practice, so I get to experience the frictions of healthcare delivery and watching patients navigate the complexity or failures of healthcare delivery.

Tennr, as an origin story, I love because they started off as young computer scientists at Stanford…They earned [experience] through going after really complex problems that happen behind the scenes. I know as a hospitalist I certainly was never aware of all of the work that it takes when I think about a patient going home on hospice and how that bed arrives, how it gets paid for.

We have an obligation to serve [a] patient if [an] order is handwritten, if it’s been typed in a fax, or if it’s been electronically generated out of Epic. You really haven’t solved something if you can just do it out of an electronic transmission. You have to represent the entire spectrum.

What appeals to you about working for a startup?

I went from large enterprise to massively large enterprise to small. [Tennr’s] thesis and focus to understand the problem first and then build a solution is intentional…We have a very clear thesis that we want to provide unbelievable value through the management of referrals and orders for the benefit of the patient, the providers, and the cost of care. We don’t claim to solve for capacity and do documentation, scribing, and all of that. We are laser focused. I think that’s a blessing to go really, really deep in an area, as opposed to all over.

Cleveland Clinic [also] has an entire dais of developers, and they can build stuff and take Lego pieces and deploy innovation. But other US hospitals don’t have that luxury. They need someone to show up, be professional, be deployed, and get it right.

How do you see the future of Tennr?

If you think about a referral, it feels on the surface like a transaction: I need to go see a cardiologist, so process that order, make sure it meets eligibility, benefits, and qualifications, and get it satisfied. If we just make that process faster but the cardiology clinic still has a two-month waitlist, you didn’t really change the outcome. You just made the queue faster.

Where we feel the opportunity is how do we help prioritize and navigate those patients so it’s the right patient to the right provider at the right time in the right format?

There’s been a lot around physician burnout. And how do we make the physician office more productive? AI can do chart summarization, all that kind of stuff…but are there other levels of service? Are we leveraging our colleagues or our advanced practice providers? Are we leveraging telehealth? Are we leveraging alternative sites of care?

I think this has been something that’s been resonating a lot with our multispecialty, multiprovider partners, who recognize that, yes, [they] can take what would take manually two weeks and make it down to two hours. And that’s awesome, right? But if we don’t solve the bottleneck problem at the end, then we’re not really effectively changing the patient experience, the outcome, or the cost.