ByAmy Feldman,
Forbes Staff.
J
ustin Ho knows a lot about navigation. He’s quarterbacked Uber’s self-driving and mapping strategy and built dispatch and routing software at rideOS wrangling issues like scheduling, intelligent dispatch and pricing. Now he’s bringing his mapping acumen to bear on a new challenge: making it easier to navigate the rat’s maze that is healthcare appointments. With Chris Blumenberg, coinventor of the iPhone and his cofounder at rideOS, and Dr. Caesar Djavaherian, cofounder of Carbon Health, Ho has launched Sage Care to help patients and healthcare systems deal with navigation mess.
Broadly, healthcare navigation covers all routing, referrals, appointment booking and messaging involved in getting the right patient to the right doctor at the right time. That might sound rudimentary, but it’s not. If you’re discharged from the ER with orders to see a cardiologist in three days but can’t get an appointment for six months, for example, that’s a problem for both you and the health system whose ER you might wind back up in.
