Locata

AI Referral Automation for Primary Care Clinics

Summer 2025

Active

https://www.locatahealth.com/

AI Referral Automation for Primary Care Clinics

Locata is an AI referral management platform for Primary Care. We deploy AI agents to automate every step of the referral process that back-office staff face daily, from submitting prior authorizations to broadcasting updates and following up with patients. This frees up staff to focus on patient care. Primary care back-offices are severely understaffed and overburdened by administrative work associated with referrals. Additionally, patients suffer navigating the complex referral process, which can have disastrous health effects if they don’t get the care they need. These factors point to a glaring gap in the system—where out of over 100 million specialist referrals issued annually in the US, only half are actually completed. Locata is tackling this problem head-on, saving administrative staff hours each week and ensuring that the referral process goes as smoothly as possible for patients and their providers. Alejandro and Josh met at Stanford where they graduated with BS degrees in Computer Science. Alejandro was a senior software engineer at Meta’s Reality Labs where he led development of several AI features for wearable products and prior to that conducted AI research at Stanford Medicine. Josh graduated with a masters in Computer Science, specializing in AI, before working as a software engineer at Google where he developed AI products that served over 1 billion users. Within two weeks of building our product, we signed a major regional health center and have saved them over 100 hours of work in our first month live.

Active Founders

Alejandro Salinas

Founder

Alejandro is the Co-Founder of Locata. He holds a BS in Computer Science from Stanford University where he conducted AI research at Stanford Medicine. A former pre-med, Alejandro spent multiple summers shadowing doctors domestically and internationally. He has deep experience building AI products. As a Senior Software Engineer at Meta Reality Labs, he led development of several AI features for wearable products. He also authored an AI patent.

Alejandro Salinas

Founder

Joshua Chang

Founder

Joshua is the Co-Founder of Locata. He graduated Stanford with a BS & MS in Computer Science, specializing in AI. Previously he was a software engineer at Google, developing AI products that served over 1 billion users.

Joshua Chang

Founder

Company Launches

Locata - AI Referral Management for Health Centers

See original launch post

Hey everyone, we’re Alejandro and Josh - cofounders of Locata 👋

TL;DR

Referral management is one of the most time-consuming and error-prone tasks in healthcare. Locata eliminates that burden by automating the entire process with AI. This helps health centers streamline their operations, reduce costs, and ensure patients get timely care.

https://youtu.be/IwyUifa8MnE

❌ The Problem

Referrals are one of the most critical, yet most broken, parts of the US healthcare system. Health centers are required to track specialist referrals to ensure continuity of patient care and meet quality standards. But with limited staff and overwhelming administrative demands, health centers struggle to keep up, leading many to outsource the work.

Consequences:

High error rates in referrals
Denied authorizations and delays in specialist appointments
Wasted time manually copying data between various systems

Impact:

These operational inefficiencies create major financial risks for health centers. On top of the resources centers already deploy to manage referrals, failure to effectively close the loop puts quality standards in jeopardy, carrying even greater financial implications.

👷 Our Solution

Locata uses AI to automate the referral management process from end-to-end. Imagine having a team of the world’s best referral coordinators that operate with higher accuracy, lower costs, and faster delivery, giving health centers the capacity to scale on demand and close more referral loops.

AI auth submission: Our AI extracts patient data directly from EHRs, intelligently maps it to the correct authorization forms across different payor portals, and submits requests automatically.
Automated status updates: We monitor authorization status continuously, with automatic notifications sent to staff for cases requiring urgent attention.
Voice AI patient follow-up: Our Voice AI calls patients on customizable cadences to monitor whether they’ve made a specialist appointment. Our system alerts staff when they need to step in to offer additional support.
Consult note retrieval: Once a patient confirms an appointment, our AI automatically contacts specialists, requesting consult notes to effortlessly close the loop.

Within two weeks of building our product, we signed a major regional health center and are taking them live to automate their entire referral workflow.

🙏 Our Ask

We would love introductions to physicians or administrative staff at health centers. Contact us at founders@locata.ai.
Learn more at locatahealth.com

👫 The Team

Alejandro and Josh have known each other for almost 10 years.

Alejandro was a senior software engineer at Meta’s Reality Labs, where he led AI projects that resulted in a patent submission. He holds a BS degree in Computer Science from Stanford University. As an undergrad, he conducted AI research at Stanford Medicine and shadowed doctors internationally.

Josh was a software engineer at Google, working on AI products that served over 1 billion users. He holds BS & MS degrees in Computer Science from Stanford University.

YC Photos