A lot of the conversation around AI in healthcare focuses on diagnostics and drug discovery or on doctor-patient visits. But a less visible part of the system affects whether patients actually get seen at all, and it has less to do with the number of doctors in the world (too few) and more with the administrative work (too much) that happens between a primary care doctor writing a referral and a specialist’s office getting a patient on the schedule. That gap, it turns out, is huge, stubbornly manual, and increasingly attracting serious interest from venture capitalists.
Kaled Alhanafi, a former Lyft and Cruise executive, and Chetan Patel, who spent a decade building cardiac devices at Medtronic, co-founded Basata after each came to this problem personally.