The operating system for digital health - one HIPAA-compliant home for patient communication, intake, and the busywork nobody wants to do by hand.
It is a Tuesday at a fast-growing virtual clinic. A patient asks a question by SMS. A form arrives. Insurance needs verifying. A follow-up is due in three days. A year ago, that single patient would have lived across five browser tabs and two spreadsheets. Today it lives in one screen - and the follow-up sends itself.
That screen is Tellescope. It is not glamorous software. It does not promise to reinvent medicine. It does something quieter and, for a care team drowning in tabs, far more useful: it puts the whole patient in one place and automates the parts that never needed a human.
The company was born from a simple, slightly unglamorous observation: building a patient management system is unreasonably hard. Digital health founders had three bad options and no good ones. Tellescope decided to be the good one.
Cambridge to New York. Two interns to thirteen people. The tabs, mercifully, are gone.
Sebastian Coates and Derek Strauss met as college interns at Vertex Pharmaceuticals. Coates went on to work on the Apple Watch at Apple; Strauss did a turn in technology consulting at Ernst & Young. In 2020 they landed in the Techstars and UnitedHealthcare accelerator and did the unfashionable thing: they talked to people. Hundreds of care team members and digital health leaders, one conversation at a time.
The pattern was hard to miss. Every digital health company hit the same wall. To manage patients, you could cobble together sales tools that were never built for medicine, build your own system at ruinous cost, or overspend on enterprise software heavy enough to sink a startup. None of it was designed for the way modern care actually works - by text, by chat, across a team, under HIPAA.
So they built a flexible, developer-friendly platform - API-first, so it extends an EHR instead of fighting it - that lets a health company round out its tech stack, scale quickly, and stay focused on patients rather than plumbing. The name is a play on "telescope": a lens that brings the whole patient into focus.
Tufts computer science and mathematics. Former software engineering intern at Apple, where he worked on the Apple Watch. Now steering Tellescope's product and vision.
Met Coates while interning at Vertex Pharmaceuticals. Cut his teeth in technology consulting at Ernst & Young before co-founding the company and running operations.
The kind of founding team that reads the code and the contract. Rare, and it shows.
Everything a care team touches, from first message to follow-up, without leaving the tab.
Every patient's context, tasks, and history in one HIPAA-compliant record - no more spreadsheet archaeology.
SMS, email, secure chat, and video in a single inbox. Reach patients on the channel they actually use.
Smart digital flows capture data, consent, and insurance with forms that cut manual entry.
Drag-and-drop automations for internal ops and patient engagement. No code required.
A brandable telemedicine platform for synchronous and asynchronous virtual care.
API-first architecture that plugs into EHRs and clinical tools instead of replacing them.
Relative time & effort to a working patient stack. Illustrative - shorter is better.
"Deliver a world class patient & care team experience."
From mental health to metabolic care, they picked a stack built for them.
Fella provides men with science-backed weight loss care. Its old workflow was manual - hard to see where a client was in the program or track communications. On Tellescope's CRM the team now sees every client's full context, centralizes tasks, and automates what used to be done by hand.
Anise Health uses the API for self-scheduling and secure chat. Octave uses it to make care navigation less of a scavenger hunt.
Coates and Strauss join Techstars '20 and the UnitedHealthcare accelerator, raising a $120K seed and interviewing hundreds of care teams.
The platform grows into a full suite - CRM, multi-channel communication, intake, automation, telehealth - with SOC 2 and HIPAA baked in.
Sebastian Coates unveils a full rebrand and publishes Tellescope's annual digital health resource lists.
Guides on top digital health accelerators and must-join communities cement Tellescope as a voice in the space.
The co-founders met as college interns at Vertex Pharmaceuticals - the company predates either of their diplomas.
Before Tellescope, Coates helped build the Apple Watch as an engineering intern at Apple.
"Tellescope" plays on telescope - the logo is a lens, the promise is a clear, wide view of every patient.
Hundreds of interviews came before a line of production code. The product was reported, not guessed.
The patient's text still arrives on a Tuesday. But now it lands beside their intake, their insurance, their last visit, and the follow-up that will fire on its own in three days. The nurse reads one screen, replies once, and moves on. Nothing heroic happened. That is exactly the point.
Tellescope did not cure a disease. It removed the friction between a care team and the patient in front of them - the copying, the tab-switching, the forgotten follow-up. In digital health, whoever automates the busywork first tends to win. The tabs are gone. The patient got a faster answer. And somewhere, a care team got its Tuesday back.
Watch & learn: browse product demos and walkthroughs on the Tellescope features pages, or search "Tellescope demo" on YouTube for interviews and product tours.