We’re going after one of the biggest problems in healthcare: specialty care access.

Primary care is becoming more bookable. The moment a PCP says “you need a specialist,” the system fractures because no one really owns the handoff. Payors optimize for cost, providers optimize for capacity, systems optimize for throughput, and the burden lands on patients.

The scale is enormous even if you only look at completed office-based care. In 2018, CDC’s NAMCS estimates about 95 million new-patient visits to medical and surgical specialists each year, which is likely an underestimate today. Based on referral-status shares for new non-PCP visits and conservative estimates of who actually books referred care, about 20.5 million of those visits are not physician-referred, about 15.1 million have unknown referral status, and another roughly 30 to 40 million are physician-referred but still scheduled by the patient. Altogether that implies on the order of 50 to 75 million new specialist appointments per year where the patient is effectively doing the scheduling work.

Furthermore, the completed-visit numbers understate the true magnitude of the problem because the system drops a large share of referrals before they ever become a booked visit. In one large health-system study, only 34.8 percent of referral scheduling attempts resulted in a documented completed appointment, and 38.9 percent had no appointment date recorded at all.

The experience is costly in time and effort. One audit found it takes about 3.3 calls and roughly 30-60 minutes of caller time to secure an appointment. Access is also slow. AMN reports an average wait of about 31 days for a new patient appointment across surveyed specialties and major metros.

Delightful takes ownership of that gray area. We provide agentic infrastructure for care navigation beyond the PCP, turning referral intent into a booked, prepared, completed specialist visit with clear cost and closed-loop coordination. Specialists should compete on access, quality, and total cost, patients should win, and we connect the dots.

We are building agentic infrastructure for care navigation beyond the PCP.

After a primary care visit, patients often need specialists, labs, imaging, or treatment. At this point the system becomes fragmented and manual. Patients are told to call a number, find someone in network, or wait for a call, and then must figure out cost, availability, quality, paperwork, and logistics on their own.Our insight is that the biggest failure in healthcare is that anything that doesnt have a direct owner falls through the cracks.

The problem persists because incentives between patients, providers, and payors are misaligned, which fractures the data required to solve it. The information needed to choose the right next step in care exists, but it is spread across payor directories, provider schedules, quality datasets, referral workflows, and cost data. No single party has the incentive or ability to unify it into a usable experience for patients.

This fragmentation creates real economic pain for every stakeholder. Patients face heavy friction and often make 5+ calls just to find an appropriate specialist. Providers lose high intent patients through referral leakage and empty appointment slots. Payors absorb higher costs when members end up at higher cost sites of care simply because they were easier to access.

The key insight is that the moment after a primary care visit is a high intent decision point that no one owns. Patients are motivated to act, providers want those patients, and payors want them routed to the right sites of care. Yet the handoff is still manual, phone/fax based, and operationally broken.

We believe this gap exists because the solution requires coordinating across all three stakeholders at once. That coordination has historically been too operationally complex for software to handle. Agentic systems now make it possible to execute the real world tasks required to complete the handoff, unify fragmented data sources, and turn intent into completed care.