The back office problem that explains why specialists never call you back

A striking development has emerged in artificial intelligence. 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, CEO and co-founder of Basata, grew up in Jordan and came to the U.

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to study computer science. He spent five years at Lyft, eventually overseeing operations teams covering most of the country, then went to Cruise, the self-driving car company, where he served as general manager for the Phoenix market.

One of his co-founders, Chetan Patel, has a PhD in biomedical engineering with a focus in neuroscience and spent a decade at Medtronic building implantable cardiac devices. The two met in college and reconnected when their careers converged on the same problem.

This advance offers important signals about the future of the sector, and the tech world is watching closely.