Former Cleveland Clinic and Google Executive Dr. William H. Morris Joins Tennr as Chief Medical Officer
- Finance
ThePostMaster- 0
- 7 minutes read
NEW YORK, Feb. 18, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Tennr today announced that Dr. William H. Morris, former Cleveland Clinic and Google executive, has joined the company as Chief Medical Officer. Tennr helps health systems intelligently triage and route orders and referrals so patients get the right care, at the right time, at the right place.
Today, unfiltered demand for specialty care is overwhelming the already scarce supply for that type of care. Every year in the U.S, 1 in 3 patients is referred to a specialist, yet only 35% of those patients are actually seen.
Inundated health systems have no effective way to properly triage and route patients based on the care they truly need. A patient with a headache might be sent for a neurology referral and wait six months to be seen, when in reality they may only need a routine checkup or have a moderate migraine that could be handled in a virtual setting more immediately. At the same time, high-acuity patients with serious risk profiles are not being seen quickly enough because the backlog is so large.
For specialty providers, demand continues to pile up, but providers often don’t know whether it is the right demand. Backlogs grow to an insurmountable level, workflows remain manual, and clinicians are left managing referral queues instead of spending time with patients.
Dr. Morris has seen these exact challenges play out from various vantage points across the healthcare system. At Cleveland Clinic, he held Chief Innovations Officer and Associate Chief Information Officer roles, creating internal technology such as their eICU and remote telemetry system to help shift reactive critical care into proactive care. As Google Cloud’s Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Morris led the deployment of emerging frontier language and imaging models across healthcare delivery and life sciences. Across these experiences, he saw that order and referral management were one of the most powerful, yet under-addressed levers for triaging care and improving patient access.
“For the patient experience, access to affordable, high-quality care is paramount. But that access is challenged when demand for care overwhelms a limited supply of resources,” said Dr. Morris. “To alleviate the pain points for both patients and providers, we have to improve how we deliver the Five Rights: care in the right place, at the right venue, for the right cost, at the right time, in the right format. When we use technology to empower providers to do their jobs more efficiently and effectively, we bring empathy, judgment, and humanity back to medicine.”
