CEO Spotlight Interview
Modernizing Healthcare Information Intake with Tonic
Patrick Bruce, Jhonathan Vazquez & Rachel Brown, Co-Founders, Tonic
Co-Founder Backgrounds
Patrick Bruce grew up watching his father — a brilliant surgeon — practice advanced medicine while constantly bogged down by faxes, dense referrals, and administrative overhead. After serving as CIO of a large practice and leading NLP technology teams, he recognized that much of healthcare's operational drag stems from a broken intake process. Jhonathan Vazquez spent nearly a decade at McKesson Specialty Health helping oncology and specialty practices improve efficiency, gaining a deep understanding of the nuanced workflows and pain points each stakeholder experiences during intake. Rachel Brown brings both founder experience in health and wellness and a deeply personal motivation: years ago, her stepfather's stage 4 cancer diagnosis left her family trapped in weeks of referral red tape, feeling helpless to access the care they needed. Together, the three met through MBA coursework and knew immediately they could tackle healthcare's gnarliest challenges.
“Much of healthcare's operational drag stems from a broken intake process — and fixing it would give providers the ability to focus more on delivering quality care.”
“We saw an opportunity to redesign the intake experience from the ground up, using modern AI to tackle a problem that's been ignored for too long.”
The Founding of Tonic
Tonic was founded by three people who each arrived at the same broken system from a different angle. Patrick saw it through his father's eyes — a world-class surgeon buried in faxes and referral paperwork. Jhonathan lived inside it for a decade at McKesson, watching manual intake create downstream chaos across every clinical workflow. Rachel felt it as a family member — weeks of referral red tape standing between her stepfather's stage 4 cancer diagnosis and the oncologist who could help. When the three met through their MBA program, the problem was the same and the conviction was clear: intake had been ignored for too long. Titan Intake was their answer — an AI-native solution designed to redesign the intake experience from the ground up.
The Problems Being Solved with AI-Native Intake
Healthcare organizations face staffing shortages, fragmented systems, and mounting pressure to be more efficient without sacrificing growth. Intake is often the overlooked bottleneck that affects every subsequent workflow — the place where critical referral and patient data enter the system, yet remains slow, manual, and error-prone. Titan Intake solves this with an AI-powered engine that ingests all external records, then classifies, indexes, extracts, triages, and routes them to the appropriate clinical workflows. Manual data entry is eliminated, turnaround time is reduced, and referral summaries are standardized to improve provider decision-making.
“Titan Intake is the only AI-native intake solution purpose-built for enterprises and large specialist practices — AI First and engineered for precision, trust, and scale.”
The platform also automates status updates to patients and referring providers, reducing phone calls, boosting satisfaction, driving more referrals, and increasing appointment conversion. Tonic is not just compliant — it is enterprise-grade, having achieved SOC 2 Type II certification. Designed from the ground up for the most nuanced and mission-critical workflows in healthcare for surgical specialists, Titan Intake helps customers improve access, reduce cost, and scale smarter.
A Future-Forward Partnership: Tonic and Tau Ventures
The team at Tau Ventures has been incredibly responsive, accessible, and straightforward. From day one, the Tonic team has felt Tau's conviction in both the team and the mission — not just at the time of investment, but consistently since. Tau has made a conscious, ongoing effort to put Tonic in front of the right audiences and platforms to grow, with guidance that is always sharp, concise, and grounded in real-world experience.