One of our founders sat in a hospital café waiting for a physio appointment when they spotted a consultant they knew, triaging referrals by hand. Stacks of paper. Scribbled notes. Passed to a secretary to process. Minutes later, he pointed out another junior doctor at another table doing exactly the same thing. 

It struck us then: here's a healthcare system with robots in theatres, AI in diagnostics, cutting-edge technology everywhere—and yet the moment a new patient needs to be seen, it all funnels down to a manual, paper-based process. Coffee stains on referrals. Handwriting nobody can read. Clinical urgency is often decided not by a doctor, but by whoever happens to be sitting at the desk that morning. And as one consultant put it, the person making those decisions is often the lowest-paid, least-clinically-trained person in the entire infrastructure.

That's when we knew: this wasn't a nice-to-have. It was a patient safety issue hiding in plain sight.

Alto Health was founded on a simple observation…painful repetitive, paper based tasks at the front door of high tech care.

Alto Health was founded to address a critical friction point in the patient journey: the "front door" of the clinic. While clinical medicine has seen rapid advancement, the administrative infrastructure supporting it remains largely manual. Currently, 80% of patient data arrives in "unstructured" formats—faxes, emails, and PDFs—leaving clinical and commercial risks invisible until they are manually processed.

We believe that technology should support, not disrupt, the patient-doctor relationship. We built Alto to take the "detective work" out of healthcare administration. By transforming messy, fragmented intake into decision-ready clinical data, we unburden administrative staff and empower clinicians to focus on high-value care.

Based in Ireland and serving the UK and European markets, we are committed to building a transparent, clinical-grade gateway that ensures no patient is lost in the transition from referral to treatment.