Inside Commure and HealthTap's new tech-infused telehealth offering

AI-first health tech company Commure and virtual primary care company HealthTap have teamed up to offer a turnkey model for virtual care, enabling health systems to seamlessly add on a virtual care workforce and expand their reach to more patients. 

Healthcare delivery organizations that use Commure’s AI revenue cycle management solution, AI agents or AI scribe can now plug in HealthTap’s virtual care workforce at the push of a button. The companies are touting the partnership as a way to stand up new infrastructure for no upfront cost. 

The partnership between Commure and HealthTap offers providers a way to expand the geographic reach of care as well as take a load off of clinicians while expanding capacity for the system or providing a new line of service like 24/7 clinician availability. Health systems can add virtual primary care and after-hours coverage without the need to build or staff them internally, the companies said.

CEO of Commure Tanay Tandon and CEO of HealthTap Sean Mehra met nearly a decade ago at Stanford where Mehra was a mentor and Tandon, an aspiring healthcare entrepreneur. At the time, Tandon was devising early concepts of Athelas, which later became Commure. 

While at Stanford, Tandon said Mehra helped push him to think about Athelas’ commercialization, reimbursement, distribution and scale, which he said helped him develop the company and led to its success. 

The healthcare entrepreneurs reconnected nearly 10 years later, when both Commure and HealthTap, where Mehra has held many executive roles, had matured. They saw an opportunity for collaboration. 

“We're a provider group,” Mehra explained. “Commure provides technology infrastructure to run practices better … And it almost was like an obvious leap to then say, maybe Commure should not only be selling technology, but technology-enabled services.”

Mehra continued: “Instead of just buying the software, buy the software and the doctors that use the software.”

Not only did the two see a business opportunity, but their combined product stood to more efficiently operate healthcare practices and shore up a provider workforce that is burned out and diminishing in number.

The Commure tech stack already simplifies health systems' back office and clinical workflows. Adding HealthTap's virtual care workforce, who are trained on the tech, will also lower the adoption curve of AI for provider groups, the two said.

HealthTap specializes in longitudinal virtual primary care. Primary care is often a revenue neutral or revenue sink for healthcare organizations, who often rely on booking specialty appointments and procedures to make money, Mehra explained. Telehealth is a cheaper way to provide care and a way for provider groups to take on a higher operating margin without losing focus on their core services. 

“What we're saying here … is you should virtualize and augment your primary care department with a medical group that will present as you and bill as you in a way where the day one costs require no upfront investment and immediate cost savings with all of the same downstream ROI,” Mehra said.

For example, Tandon said, specialty-focused provider groups could turn on HealthTap and access remote monitoring and chronic condition management for their patients. 

Together, Commure and HealthTap will sell their services as a turnkey package to large and midsized provider organizations. They will begin with mid-market provider-owned and private-equity-owned groups and will likely expand to large organizations. Commure plays host to some of the largest healthcare systems in the nation, including Tenet Healthcare, HCA Healthcare and Summa Health. 

The companies chose to capitalize on each others’ strengths and offer the combined product rather than trying to stand up their own solutions. Mehra and Tandon said they want to maintain excellence in their core businesses—virtual primary care and AI infrastructure. 

“The reason that tech in general grew so quickly throughout the 2010s is great businesses relied on each other's infrastructure,” Tandon said. “Every business was built on [Amazon Web Services or Google Cloud]. Uber, Instacart used Stripe, and that allowed them to grow their payment stack globally so quickly. And I think it's very similar here. We're both great infrastructure providers.”