Is there a better way to manage healthcare? This pre-med student has an idea.

Scheduling a doctor’s appointment can be an arduous process. You call, perhaps leave a message for the administrator. Then, it seems inevitable that they’ll call you back during the few minutes you look away from the phone. You play phone-tag for a while before connecting and attempting to find a day and time that works on both ends. It can take days or weeks to finally see the doctor.

But what if there were a better way?

After several stints working in healthcare settings, Naomi Rajput, a pre-med student at Northeastern University wondered exactly that. Not content just to wonder, though, Rajput did something about it. She created CareWallet, a digital health solution that quickly connects patients with providers—and connects providers with the health information of their patients.

“We are trying to target different administrative burdens in the healthcare setting,” Rajput says. “By that, I mean: scheduling operations; automating insurance checks; helping people check into their appointment effortlessly, without having to fill out 20-30 minutes of paperwork; really just taking out the redundancy from healthcare, and making it very easily accessible.”

In the process, she hopes to ease the high rates of burnout among administrative staff in healthcare settings, many of whom spend all day doing repetitive, thankless tasks.

For her ingenuity, Rajput was recognized among this year’s Northeastern University Women Who Empower Innovator Awards. The annual awards honor entrepreneurs for their innovative, boundary-pushing work. This year’s recipients—students and alumni from the Northeastern community—were selected by a panel of judges and will receive a total of $500,000 in funding. Rajput took third place among undergraduate student award winners, and third place in the speciality award category, “Powering a Healthy Tomorrow.”

“Naomi is a fast learner, dedicated, and independent,” says Jyotsna Mehta, CEO and founder of KevaHealth, and one of Rajput’s mentors. Mehta added that she sees CareWallet helping to “reduce administrative burden for physicians.”

Rajput compares CareWallet to the existing digital wallets that come along with various smartphones—Apple Wallet and Google Wallet, among them. These digital wallets can hold (digital) copies of someone’s debit and credit cards, along with paperless event tickets, loyalty cards, and transit cards. A quick tap on most card readers opens the wallet and gives users easy access to the many payment options available to them.

“Now, imagine checking into a doctor’s appointment with just the tap of your phone,” Rajput says. CareWallet could hold a patient’s medical history, medication and allergy lists, pharmacy preferences—the possibilities, as Rajput sees them, are endless.

From the provider’s perspective, CareWallet could be a scheduling platform, one that communicates directly with provider availability and gives patients the power to schedule their own appointments. Gone are the days of back-and-forth scheduling calls.

CareWallet would also help sort out burdensome insurance issues, Rajput says. As the system stands now, administrative staff often find themselves caught in the middle of patients’ insurance provider and their healthcare provider, trying to get to the bottom of a claim or of coverage.

Another big headache CareWallet could solve, Rajput says, is in the referral process. One doctor refers a patient to another doctor for a specific procedure or test, and administrators are tasked with being the go-between for all of these parties.

“When you want to see new doctors, you don’t always want to call 10 billion offices asking if they received your specific referral form,” she says. “More often than not, they’re like, ‘No, we didn’t receive,’ and then you’re stuck in a lot of unnecessary back and forth, which is what we’re trying to eliminate with our technology.”

Rajput’s own experiences working as a medical assistant, phlebotomist, and pediatric researcher serve as the basis for her venture.

“With all those different experiences, there were some things that I didn’t like about the administrative workflows in these medical practices—both from the patient’s point of view and also as an administrator working in these practices,” she says. Sometimes, it seemed that everywhere she looked she saw an opportunity for better efficiency and care.

“I love digital health. I love innovation. So whenever I observed folks who struggled to remember their health history, or administrators tired of filing paper files all day, it seemed like a great opportunity to bring in new digital innovations,” Rajput says.

Rajput and her co-founder in CareWallet recently hired two Northeastern students on co-op to help flesh out the company. And the financial support from Women Who Empower will help power front-end and back-end development, Rajput says.

Throughout this ongoing development, the patient populations she hopes to reach—namely, new and geriatric patients—are never far from her mind.

“I push a lot within the team to make it very user-friendly, and very intuitive, even for older folks,” she says. For example, she says, “we have this concept of family trees. So, instead of the patient having to navigate on their own, they can add a family member, and that family member can help them navigate the signup process. I’m very proud of the fact that we’re very cognizant of these other populations.”

The CareWallet team is small, and still in a “pre-seed funding” stage, Rajput says. But she’s gotten buy-in on the concept, even just anecdotally, from a number of providers, she says.

“We’ve had really positive reactions to pitching at doctors’ offices,” she says. “We want to make things easier and more efficient for the people in jobs with some of the highest rates of turnover.”