Basalt Health raises $20M for post-acute referral decisions

Basalt Health has raised a $20 million Series A for software that helps post-acute care providers decide whether to accept patients referred by hospitals. Admissions teams at behavioral-health, skilled-nursing, long-term-care and rehabilitation facilities use the platform to review referral packets, while clinicians retain the final call. NEA led the financing, with Frist Cressey Ventures and 25m Health participating.

A referral can arrive as a faxed PDF, scan, photograph, portal message or electronic health-record feed. Basalt reads the packet, tests the patient information against that facility’s criteria by unit and payer, then presents red, yellow or green findings linked to the source record. The software prepares the evidence; a person still decides whether the patient fits an available bed.

That makes Basalt a document-review layer inside an old, fragmented handoff, not an autonomous admissions system. Hospitals need to move patients into settings such as rehabilitation or skilled nursing, but receiving teams may have to work through long packets before judging clinical fit and coverage. The company says Lifepoint Health cut median chart-processing time from 8.5 minutes to 1.2 minutes after deploying the product.

The rollout plan centers on two large health-system networks. Basalt says it is extending the platform to 49 more Lifepoint markets and deploying it across 62 ScionHealth hospitals by the end of 2026. At ScionHealth, the company expects the system to manage incoming referrals across a network of more than 6,000 practitioners.

Basalt also reuses the cited material for benefits checks, prior authorizations, concurrent reviews and appeals. That connects the clinical placement decision with the payer paperwork that follows, without asking staff to extract the same facts again.

The new capital will fund an expansion from admissions into discharge and payer workflows, along with sales, implementation and engineering hiring. Basalt plans to complete the Lifepoint and ScionHealth deployments by the end of 2026.