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Basalt Health Raises $20M Series A to Speed Post-Acute Admissions
NEA leads the Nashville startup's round after it cut referral processing from 8.5 minutes to 1.2 at Lifepoint Health.
Basalt Health, a Nashville startup that uses AI to speed up post-acute care admissions, has raised a $20 million Series A led by New Enterprise Associates. Frist Cressey Ventures and 25m Health also participated.
The company was founded by CEO Ben Hackett.
The 70-Page Packet Problem
When a hospital patient is ready to move to a skilled nursing facility or rehab, case managers send referral packets, often by fax, to multiple facilities and wait for someone to review them and respond. Patients sit in hospital beds while that plays out.
Basalt's platform reads incoming referrals, whether they arrive by fax, portal or EMR integration, and matches the patient against each facility's clinical criteria so admissions decisions come back faster.
"Case managers are still sending 70-page packets and waiting for responses, while patients remain stranded in hospital beds," Hackett said. "Basalt turns that uncertainty into fast, defensible decisions."
Early Results
At Lifepoint Health, the platform cut median referral processing time from 8.5 minutes to 1.2 minutes, an 86% reduction, according to the company.
Basalt works with Lifepoint Health and ScionHealth, and expects to be live across 62 hospitals by the end of 2026.
"Basalt is what we mean when we say AI should disappear into the workflow. Case managers don't see a chatbot. They see the right bed, faster," said Merrill Anovick, general partner at 25madison.
Where the Money Goes
The company plans to extend the platform into discharge and payer workflows and to grow its sales, marketing, implementation and engineering teams.
HIT Consultant reported the raise as funding to scale the platform across post-acute markets.
Why It Matters
Delayed discharges are expensive on both sides. Hospitals lose bed capacity while patients wait for placement, and post-acute facilities lose revenue on empty beds they could have filled had they seen the referral sooner.
The workflow is also one of the last places in healthcare still running on fax machines, which makes it a natural target for document-reading AI. The commercial test is whether facilities trust automated criteria matching enough to act on it, since a wrong placement carries clinical and regulatory consequences.
Source
Business Wire — "Basalt Health Raises $20M Series A Led by NEA to Speed Post-Acute Admissions"