BetterNight is a sleep health provider delivering diagnosis, PAP therapy, and long-term adherence support to patients nationwide. Founded in San Diego in 1995, the company has treated more than 100,000 patients and expanded into the Northeast in 2025.
With declining reimbursement rates, fewer manufacturer discounts, and rising wages, the only real lever left for DME operators to pull is throughput per person. That's what BetterNight partnered with Tennr to change in 2024.
The Challenge
Before Tennr, BetterNight’s operations were structured around three separate teams: intake, eligibility and benefits, and qualifications, each working in isolation, manually handing work down the line, and running on tribal knowledge that lived in a handful of experienced employees' heads. Nearly all orders were processed in Brightree, while also running a separate, proprietary patient-facing platform alongside it.
Working across two systems meant the same information had to be entered twice, with every order carrying a second round of keystrokes, a second login, and a second chance to introduce a typo.
Siloed, manual processes like these are how many DMEs still operate. They're also what was hindering BetterNight's growth. By late 2023, 2,000 faxes sat in the backlog.
“It was a very manual, very labor-intensive process and it was very slow. We went through orders one at a time.”
— Rob Bovee, VP of Operations at BetterNight
BetterNight attempted to handle the increasing volume of referrals by hiring new staff. Even then, it took 6 months of training before a new hire was genuinely productive, and hiring could never keep pace with a volume spike.
Rob eventually tried a few automation vendors. Each one could make individual steps faster, but staff still had to sit and wait on the system between them, while the number of orders one person could clear in a day remained unchanged.
Until he found Tennr.
Switching to Tennr
“Tennr was exactly what I was looking for—except a little bit more robust than I had even envisioned.”
— Rob Bovee
What excited Rob most about Tennr was its ability to orchestrate the flow of multiple orders at once. Since partnering, every operational team at BetterNight runs on Tennr: Referral Intake, Insurance Benefits Manager, Qualification Engine, and Communications Coordination.
Tennr built BetterNight an integration that writes directly into their proprietary patient-facing platform. No more toggling to a second screen, re-logging in after a session times out, or re-typing the same patient details. Tennr handles the second entry in the background.
“Tennr is the only one that figured out the fastest way to get orders from point A to point B,” said Rob.
That said, the value Rob points to most consistently is not a single product offering or a feature, but the Tennr team behind it all. Rob explained: “One of the best parts about working with the Tennr team is they are so involved, so attentive, really listen, and take what they know to then drive value.”
The Results
Since implementing Tennr, BetterNight has felt the impact:
- 2,000-order backlog, eliminated
- <24-hour average intake turnaround, down from 2–3 days
- 35% faster referral processing from intake to delivery
- ~60% fewer FTEs on eligibility and benefits at the same volume
- Entry-level staff productive in 3 days, down from 6 months
In June 2026, for the first time, the intake team processed orders faster than they arrived, clearing the queue to zero.
"Not a small task in DME… I remember years ago telling my team that someday we'd get to the point where we were just clicking refresh waiting for orders. I remember the team thinking I had lost my mind — yet here we are."
— Rob Bovee in an email to the Tennr team, June 2026
In DME, the time from intake to delivery determines how much confidence a referring provider has in sending the next patient. With first touch now happening in minutes, BetterNight confirms receipt immediately and reports patient status back to the referral source throughout the order's lifecycle.
"At the end of the day, speed is what our referrers want and what our patients want. If I can get the order from intake to delivery in a timely manner, I'm going to get people treated quicker — which is the point."
— Rob Bovee
Tennr changed how fast new people ramp, too.
“With Tennr, training is lightning fast to get somebody competent and you can move and flex your staff more easily because it’s very intuitive. Even if you work in other departments, you’ll understand the methodologies, you’ll get the processes, and you’ll know what you are doing.”
— Rob Bovee
What’s Next
BetterNight and Tennr are now rebuilding BetterNight's internal workflows from the ground up, this time designing them around the automation rather than retrofitting automation onto old processes. Led by Tennr’s platform strategists, two changes are underway: pushing more of BetterNight's institutional and tribal knowledge directly into the system, and improving the source data feeding the qualification and eligibility engines so fewer orders need manual review.
On the staffing side, BetterNight is cross-training its team so any employee can carry an order end-to-end, intake through delivery, without a handoff — a direct extension of what Tennr already made possible.
“Tennr helps us make better, faster, and more accurate decisions. It turns one person into five, or even ten.”
— Rob Bovee