Highlights
Commure, a $7 billion technology company that uses AI to automate administrative tasks in health care, offers thousands of dollars of compensation to customers and other parties willing to refer its products to new business prospects, internal documents and communications show.
Meanwhile, some of its customers report suffering steep financial losses and other negative outcomes. The company says its referral programs are industry standard and that the vast majority of its hundreds of customers are happy with its products and services.
AI is a powerful and inscrutable technology that changes every day. The effort to rapidly sell it into diverse clinical settings with customizable financial incentives magnifies the difficulty of evaluating products that directly impact the cost and quality of health services received by millions of Americans.
From its inception, Commure was built on the dream of automation.
The Silicon Valley technology company set out in 2020 to build a new operating system for health care. Its executives began to cast the company as a kind of Robin Hood: It would leverage artificial intelligence to take power and money from massive insurers and other industry giants — and give it back to doctors.
“I would love a world where the market cap of a UnitedHealth is a fifth, but every doctor is a millionaire,” Commure CEO Tanay Tandon said in a recent interview with Y Combinator, an investor in the company, currently valued at $7 billion.
But Commure isn’t just promising to fatten doctors’ wallets with money from insurers. For those willing to talk up its AI, it also offers to kick in compensation of its own.
A STAT investigation found the company offers thousands of dollars, in various forms, to medical clinics and other parties who refer its products to new business prospects. The compensation is part of a strategy to swiftly sell AI tools it says can unburden clinicians burned out by health care’s endless bureaucratic morass.
Based in Mountain View, Calif., Commure is among the most ambitious and all-encompassing efforts to automate the administrative tasks that underlie these businesses. Many of its customers speak of the company in heroic terms. In marketing videos and podcast interviews, they testify that its products for billing, scheduling, and clinical documentation have restored joy, and reliable revenue, to their practices. The company claims its tools are used by more than 500 health care organizations across the country, including “130 of the nation’s largest health systems,” such as for-profit giants HCA Healthcare and Tenet Healthcare.
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