Why we built this
Somani started TurnipCare after a difficult pregnancy and her newborn’s first months, which meant a lot of specialists, a lot of phone calls, and a lot of waiting to hear back.
The doctors were doing their best. The nurses went above and beyond. Even the people on the phones were trying. But it can’t be someone’s job to sit and stare at a phone all day, waiting for it to ring.
So she did what engineers do and worked the job before automating it: two years inside healthcare organizations, with spreadsheets and provider preferences, working out the rules for a process every clinic does differently.
Kjel had seen a version of it years earlier as an English-Spanish medical interpreter in the Seattle area, and brought fifteen years of building AI that understands people.
TurnipCare takes on the routine follow-up and hands anything that needs judgment to a person.
Founder & CEO
Somani is an engineer at heart. She studied EECS at MIT, spent a decade leading software and machine learning teams at Amazon Alexa and Oracle, and went on to HBS. Before writing a line of code for TurnipCare, she spent two years doing the work by hand: booking appointments, answering texts and learning how each provider likes to run their day.
Cofounder
Kjel began his career as an English-Spanish medical interpreter in the Seattle area, helping patients and clinicians understand each other. He has spent the years since building AI that understands people, from speech recognition for Xbox and Cortana to Alexa’s language understanding at Amazon, and most recently Copilot in the Edge browser at Microsoft AI.
A letter from the founders
The first thing we took on was the phone call after a referral: reach the patient, offer a real time, book it. We started there because it’s where the most care quietly goes missing, and because it’s work nobody should have to do by hand.
But a booked appointment is one step in a longer chain. Before it, someone has to read the order, check the insurance and get the authorization. After it, someone has to get the patient ready, make sure they show up, and tell the referring doctor what happened. Each of those steps lives in a different tray, inbox or portal, and each one is a place where a patient can fall through.
Until recently, every one of those steps needed a person to read something. Software can now read a faxed order, a voicemail or a letter from a payer. That changes what’s possible. No one who sees patients needs a bigger front office. They need one that never loses track.
That’s what we’re building: a front office that carries every order, referral and call from the moment it arrives to the moment the patient is seen, in any EHR, under each organization’s own rules, with a person there whenever it matters.
We’re building it the way we built the first piece: alongside real care teams, one queue at a time, measured against what their own staff could do.
Somani and Kjel
30 minutes with our team. We’ll show TurnipCare on a sample referral and how it fits your organization.
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