Headquartered in Texarkana, Texas, Total Medical Supply (TMS) provides doctors and patients across 49 states with the highest quality service and medical supplies on the market. From catheter and incontinence supplies to continuous glucose monitoring and diabetes management solutions, TMS specializes in helping patients access the products they need to improve their health, independence, and quality of life.
The challenge
Growth that headcount alone couldn't solve
At the start of 2024, TMS’s patient volume had reached an all-time high of 35,000 active patients and was continuing to climb. Their intake team had grown to eight full-time employees (FTEs) who relied on manual workflows to process up to 1,300 faxes a day, and that still wasn’t enough people to keep pace.
Despite their national footprint, TMS runs on local talent from the Texarkana community. Their reputation for high-touch, personalized service, the kind that makes patients across 49 states feel like they're working with their neighborhood provider, depends on it. Offshore or remote hiring wasn't a trade-off they were willing to make.
“We were constantly being asked ‘when are we hiring next?’,” says Trevor Danley, Chief Operating and Technology Officer.
“We were doing interviews every single day, always moving people across departments, and then scrambling to train them. It was difficult to find more staff within the city, so the question became: how do we keep scaling without having to incur more payroll in a market where payroll is getting harder to find?”
—Trevor Danley, Chief Operating and Technology Officer
TMS wasn’t just racing against their own capacity. They were racing against their competitors. In the diabetes management space, speed wins. Slower processing meant slower care, and slower care meant lost referrals and revenue.
The math was clear: TMS needed to process more patients, faster, without growing the team.
LIFE WITH TENNR
Form a fax problem to a patient orchestration platform
In March of 2024, TMS attended the annual MedTrade conference, walking into it with conviction that technology, not headcount, was the right path forward. They had been evaluating multiple solutions to help them scale, Tennr not being one of them.
After meeting Tennr on the exhibit hall floor, they saw a clear path forward. “The tech was better,” says Cole Riddell, Chief of Staff and General Counsel. “But we also believed in the team. We felt like they had the expertise to architect the right solution, and the right way of working to get us there.”
For Trevor, it came down to one word: flexibility.
“When I evaluate a technology partner, I want Play-Doh, not puzzle pieces. Every healthcare provider has the same end goal, but very different ways of getting there. Tennr didn’t say, ‘Here’s how it works.’ They said, ‘Here’s how it works for you.’”
—Trevor Danley, Chief Operating and Technology Officer
Days later, Tennr was building out TMS’s intake operations to address the immediate bottleneck.
“We quickly achieved the goals we first set,” says Trevor. Faster processing speeds, higher data entry accuracy, and a meaningful reduction in manual work were all realized within the first quarter of being rolled out.
“We quickly added new goals to partner with Tennr on. The team is always one step ahead with a solution, and that’s not something we expected going in.”
—Trevor Danley, Chief Operating and Technology Officer
The results
More volume, less overhead
With intake operations on rails:
- Processing speed increased by 3x
- FTEs could handle 50% more patients without additional support
- Team size reduced by 75%, with a team that once required eight now running on two
What started as an intake solution became something bigger: a single platform managing patient orchestration. Today, TMS's medical record reviews run through Tennr's Qualification Review Engine, catching coverage gaps and payer issues before they cause delays and denials downstream.
The results followed the same pattern as intake: more volume, faster, without adding headcount:
- Qualification reviews increased by 3x, with teams that could previously review a maximum of 200 documents per day suddenly clearing up to 600
- Qualification processing speed increased by 20% without scaling headcount
But what’s more important is what happened to the employees, who moved out of administrative work and into patient-facing roles that drive better referral relationships, retention, and the highest standard of care that TMS has always held itself to.
“I knew Tennr was working when I switched from needing to hire six more employees to seeing six team members that I could now attribute to patient access, customer service, referral engagement, and clinical support.”
— Trevor Danley, Chief Operating and Technology Officer
Today, TMS serves more than 60,000 active patients, 72% more than when they first stepped foot in Tennr’s booth.
"The partnership has allowed us to open our minds to stuff we never thought was possible. We're proving it is."
— Darius Reid, Executive Vice President
WHAT'S NEXT
Looking ahead, TMS is planning expansions into new product lines and regions for 2026, with Tennr built into the plan for every one of them. Two years in, Tennr isn’t something TMS uses to run their operation. It’s what their operation runs on.
“Despite how much Tennr has grown, the level of care we get has not changed. Tennr is right up there with our EMR as one of our most important technologies. But unlike any other software we use, it's a true partnership."
— Cole Riddell, Chief of Staff & General Counsel