How Tono Health Recovered $1.5M in Lost Revenue and Achieved 10,000% Growth by Fixing Payer Enrollment

The vision

Tono Health set out to make specialty dermatology more accessible through a virtual-first model.

As the company grew, licensing, credentialing, and payer enrollment had to keep pace. They did not. Tono had doctors ready to see patients, but no reliable way to bill for their work. Until that changed, the business could not scale.

Where it broke

Enrollment was a bottleneck from the start.

Bryson said licensing and credentialing with each plan was a major challenge.

The legacy vendor only made it worse. Tono kept chasing updates, but applications were not getting approved.

“We had been working with the legacy vendor and we’d constantly be reaching out trying to understand what the status of our applications were and none of them were being approved.”

Applications took weeks to submit and often came back with errors, missing documentation, or avoidable follow-up requests. Progress slowed. Momentum disappeared.

Over two years, Tono got zero payer enrollment applications approved.

The cost was immediate. Providers sat idle, patients lost access to in-network dermatology care, and revenue never landed.

“That probably cost us somewhere between 1 to $1.5 million in just that first year.”

Why Assured

Tono needed a partner that could actually get enrollment done.

Assured stood out because it was built by founders who had already lived the same problem. They knew the workflow, the friction, and the stakes. Tono did not need another vendor. It needed results.

What changed

The turnaround came fast.

“When we transitioned from legacy vendors to Assured, we went from not having any contracts done to getting contracts done within one month.”

Assured cleaned up the foundational data first, including entity structures, CAQH profiles, and baseline enrollment information.

Then it submitted 60 applications in the initial run.

Fifty were approved in the first month. That was an 83% success rate.

The 10 delayed applications were not bad submissions. They were held up because payer panels were closed. Assured identified that upfront, held those applications, and resubmitted automatically when the panels reopened.

Assured then expanded the effort to more than 120 total applications across additional payers and states.

“We did over 120 applications all at once. It completely catalyzed our business, transformed it and gave us hope that our business model was actually scalable.”

Where the previous vendor produced zero approvals over two years, Assured delivered 50 approvals in the first month.

The compounding effect

That broke the bottleneck. With enrollment moving in weeks instead of sitting in limbo for months, Tono could recruit providers faster, open new markets on schedule, and move quickly when payer panels opened.

Once the workflow stopped dragging on the business, everything else accelerated. Tono could bring providers online without long delays, and the team could focus on care instead of enrollment.

“This transformed our care ops team from having three people focused on this full time for us to on a weekly basis, us just being able to see the results, getting the updates, and know that it was being taken care of.”

“This allowed our care team to spend more time with patients, giving them confidence between their visits, giving them more time to support the doctors providing the care, and ultimately just gave our care team more time to connect with our patients.”

Since partnering with Assured, Tono has grown over 10,000% and expects to treat more than 100,000 patients next year.

Why it mattered for patients

For a virtual-first dermatology practice, enrollment delays are not just an operations issue. They directly affect access.

Patients with skin conditions cannot wait months for treatment. Providers will not stay idle forever. And payer windows do not stay open.

Assured cut the enrollment timeline from months to weeks, helping Tono expand access to specialty dermatology care when and where patients need it most.

“The number one thing that was different with Assured was we got contracts done, we got credentialing done and we got our doctors licensed in multiple states. The number one thing is we got results done.”

Outcome