Manage & Receive Care platform
Zach CardozaTulare, CA
I lead engineering on the Manage and Receive Care platform at Optum, with five teams under me (three onshore and two offshore). The platform covers appointment management, the referral management app (which tracks active referrals for the full UHG population and adds a Quick Referrals workflow for a target set of populations), and an AI voice agent that calls providers' offices on members' behalf so they do not have to sit on hold.
- Role
- Engineering Manager
- Employer
- Optum (UnitedHealth Group)
- Dates
- 2025 - present
- Team size
- 5 teams (3 onshore, 2 offshore)
- Scale
- Serves the full UHG member population
- Outcomes
- Active referral tracking shipped to all populations
- Quick Referrals shipped to a target set of populations
- 11 of 13 sub-projects delivered on inherited timelines
- Tech
- Typescript
- Java
- AWS
- PostgreSQL
The Referral Management System I inherited was IFP-only (Healthcare Exchange) when I picked it up. We expanded the active referral tracking out to all populations and added a new Quick Referrals workflow that lets members request referrals for specific providers on specific care paths. Quick Referrals shipped to a target set of populations, not the full universe; active referral tracking shipped to everyone. What had looked like a single project turned out to be 13 sub-projects with distinct business owners, populations, and go-live constraints. We rebaselined into 13 sub-timelines and met 11 of 13.
The scheduling voice agent is the most interesting current piece. It calls providers on a patient's behalf to book appointments, used for providers outside the appointment-management system. Replaces the patient sitting on hold all day. The engineering interest is in the orchestration: knowing when to escalate to a human, when to re-queue, and how to keep both the patient and the provider's office on the same page about state.
I am also piloting AI DLC (AI-Driven Development Life Cycle) workflows on live engineering work. The bottleneck currently is not engineering throughput. It is the upstream specification work product needs to do to feed those workflows.