NEW YORK, Feb. 18, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Tennr today announced that Dr. William H. Morris, former Cleveland Clinic and Google executive, has joined the company as Chief Medical Officer. Tennr helps health systems intelligently triage and route orders and referrals so patients get the right care, at the right time, at the right place.
Today, unfiltered demand for specialty care is overwhelming the already scarce supply for that type of care. Every year in the U.S, 1 in 3 patients is referred to a specialist, yet only 35% of those patients are actually seen.
Inundated health systems have no effective way to properly triage and route patients based on the care they truly need. A patient with a headache might be sent for a neurology referral and wait six months to be seen, when in reality they may only need a routine checkup or have a moderate migraine that could be handled in a virtual setting more immediately. At the same time, high-acuity patients with serious risk profiles are not being seen quickly enough because the backlog is so large.
For specialty providers, demand continues to pile up, but providers often don’t know whether it is the right demand. Backlogs grow to an insurmountable level, workflows remain manual, and clinicians are left managing referral queues instead of spending time with patients.
Dr. Morris has seen these exact challenges play out from various vantage points across the healthcare system. At Cleveland Clinic, he held Chief Innovations Officer and Associate Chief Information Officer roles, creating internal technology such as their eICU and remote telemetry system to help shift reactive critical care into proactive care. As Google Cloud’s Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Morris led the deployment of emerging frontier language and imaging models across healthcare delivery and life sciences. Across these experiences, he saw that order and referral management were one of the most powerful, yet under-addressed levers for triaging care and improving patient access.
“For the patient experience, access to affordable, high-quality care is paramount. But that access is challenged when demand for care overwhelms a limited supply of resources,” said Dr. Morris. “To alleviate the pain points for both patients and providers, we have to improve how we deliver the Five Rights: care in the right place, at the right venue, for the right cost, at the right time, in the right format. When we use technology to empower providers to do their jobs more efficiently and effectively, we bring empathy, judgment, and humanity back to medicine.”
In his role as Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Morris will partner with health systems to develop their air traffic control infrastructure, ensuring specialists see patients who truly need specialty care, urgent cases are prioritized automatically, and clinicians are operating at their top of licensure.
“Tennr has brought intelligence to how providers care for patients well before their appointments. It’s about making sure orders lead to the right care, not months in a queue,” said Tennr’s CEO Trey Holterman. “Will has lived this problem from the inside, and there’s no better person to lead our efforts to bring our models into triaging infrastructure to health systems across the country. For the past five years, Tennr has guided patients from point A to point B, so they don’t fall prey to the infamous black hole of healthcare. With Will, and the clinical team we’ve built, we’re moving beyond simply helping health systems process orders to helping them reason through every order so patients get the right care and specialists’ time is preserved for high-impact work. Plus, having someone that can come in and be the awkward geeky guy representing Tennr takes an incredible amount of load and responsibility off my back.”
For more information on Tennr, please visit: https://www.tennr.com/
About Tennr
Tennr helps health systems intelligently triage and route orders and referrals so patients get the right care, at the right time, at the right place. The company has raised $162 million from investors, including IVP, Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed, GV, and ICONIQ.
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SOURCE Tennr
