Locata - AI Referral Management for Health Centers
We use AI to automate the entire referral loop including authorizations, patient communication and specialist follow-up.
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.
❌ 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.
