When Healthcare Gets Personal: The Mission Behind Basata

It’s 2025. We can summon self-driving cars with our phones, order dinner that arrives in minutes, and video chat with family across the world.

And yet almost every American has experienced this scenario: you develop a concerning medical symptom, your doctor refers you to a specialist, and then you wait. Not because specialists don’t exist, but because your referral disappears into weeks of paperwork and backlogs before anyone can even call you with an appointment.

Technology has reshaped almost everything in our lives except healthcare. For real people whose health is on the line, that disconnect is both frustrating and devastating - so we walked away from what many would consider to be ‘dream jobs’ and made a commitment:

Healthcare doesn’t have to be this broken, and we were going to stake everything we had on fixing it.

When It Gets Personal, Everything Changes

The Basata story doesn’t begin in a boardroom. It begins in the painful, all-too-familiar experiences that millions of Americans face when trying to get care. For each of us, these were deeply personal moments that changed how we saw the world.

Kaled lost his mother to a heart attack when she was just 42, what should’ve been the prime of her life. This unimaginable loss was devastating to Kaled as a child, and as he grew up, this grief transformed into a constant stream of “what-ifs”:

What if she had gotten care sooner? What if the system had not failed her at the most critical moment? That loss became an unshakable conviction that healthcare could and must be better.

Years later, while working on self-driving cars, Kaled watched entire industries transform through innovation while healthcare remained stuck in the past. We could teach cars to navigate complex city streets, but his own family still couldn’t navigate the healthcare system to get basic care. The disconnect grew too heavy to bear.

For Chetan, the moment came when his wife began experiencing sudden, irregular heartbeats and fainting episode, a continuous feeling of unshakeable anxiety. They feared something was wrong when her doctor encouraged her to see a cardiologist immediately.

But weeks passed. Then months. All the while, she lived with uncertainty and fear, unable to get the care she urgently needed. Meanwhile, Chetan had spent years at Medtronic building pacemakers and implantable diagnostic devices that could regulate and monitor heartbeats and save lives; yet those innovations meant little if patients like his wife could not access care in time. The irony was crushing.

Vivin's journey came through a different door. Like all of us, Vivin had experienced that sinking feeling of calling a doctor's office, being put on hold for an hour, only to be told there were no appointments available for months. And as a technologist, he also saw the enormous potential to use his skills on something meaningful, to solve a problem that touches every family in America.

Different stories, but we all felt the same thing - being stuck watching problems we felt could (and should) be solved. Through our individual careers, we'd also all seen what was possible with today's technology. That mix of frustration and possibility became the foundation for Basata.

Committing to a Simpler Future of Healthcare

In spring 2024, after months of trading personal war stories about healthcare, we reached a consensus: the system needed a reset. The Arabic word "Basata," meaning simplicity, came to mind. Though we didn't yet know how we were going to make a change, Basata quickly became our why. We wanted to make navigating the healthcare system as simple as ordering food or getting a ride. The potential for innovation was enormous, but we knew it would require drastically changing our lives to make it happen.

Taking the Leap

The real test came when life forced our hand; two of us received offers for what many would consider “dream jobs.” Chetan was offered the opportunity to lead R&D at another medical device company. Kaled had a similar offer at another self-driving car company.

We faced a choice, continue on a traditional path or pursue something entirely uncertain. That moment became defining. We chose the harder path, and committed to devote our work and energy to transforming healthcare.

That's when we called Vivin, who had just completed his PhD in Computer Science with a focus on Cybersecurity and Machine Learning. When we pitched him on using his immense tech expertise to disrupt healthcare, it immediately resonated. He brought the technical depth to turn our vision into reality, combined with the conviction that this was a problem worth solving.

Solving the Problem

To solve real problems in healthcare, we had to start from the beginning of the patient journey. After spending time with a cardiology practice and watching their daily chaos, we realized there was a bottleneck happening before a patient could even get scheduled.

Every referral, whether it came in by fax, PDF, someone's handwritten note, had to be read by staff, patient details extracted, and manually typed into their EMR. It is slow, error-prone, and exhausting. One referral could take 15 to 20 minutes to process. A busy practice might get hundreds every week. Patients weren't just waiting for a doctor's availability; they were waiting for paperwork.

So, we first built AI that reads these unstructured medical documents and automatically extracts critical patient information, demographics, medical history, and referral details. The system categorizes the documents, structures the data, and creates complete patient charts in the practice’s EMR securely and in full HIPAA compliance. What once took hours now happens in seconds, with higher accuracy.

The system worked great. But it turns out, when you solve one bottleneck... you find the next one. Even after records are ready, staff still spent hours scheduling appointments. Our early customers made it clear: they needed this time back to support patients and enable clinicians to focus on care. So, we developed AI voice agents that handle the full scheduling workflow: they answer calls, engage in natural conversations, and schedule appointments according to each practice’s rules and calendar logic.

This isn't about replacing humans or clinical judgement - it's about freeing staff from administrative purgatory so they can focus on what actually matters most: connecting with patients and supporting care. When you automate the entire intake workflow from referral to scheduled appointment, something magical happens. Patients get in faster, doctors spend more time on care, and the system finally works like it should have all along.

Building the Future of Healthcare

As we built Basata, we spoke with hundreds of healthcare professionals. And every single call confirmed our belief: the technology we were creating could transform not just one practice, but the entire healthcare system.

The results speak for themselves: practices using Basata process 100% of incoming documents the same day, redirect 40% more administrative time to patient-facing care, and get patients from intake to scheduled 80% faster.

It’s the difference between simply building technology and completely redefining best practices for an entire industry.

Looking Ahead

Basata is built upon the belief that every moment in healthcare should be spent on patient care, and nothing else. There's a doctor with a solution and a patient with a problem. Doctors should have the time to treat, patients should have the access they need, and staff should be free from repetitive administrative burdens that pull them away from people.

The next decade will define American healthcare. We've committed ours to making sure it changes for the better. For Kaled’s mother, for Chetan’s wife, for every American who’s ever sat with the unshakeable anxiety of knowing a solution exists… but a flawed system keeps it just out of reach.

Because in a world where technology can do almost anything, there’s no excuse for healthcare to remain this broken.