For Zing Health, the first of the month is a busy time.
It’s the time when Medicare patients enroll in their health plan, and Zing Health employees are faced with a load of enrollment tasks, including assessing the patients’ health needs and working on their care plans.
Most of Zing Health’s members have special needs, and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services requires plans to conduct a health risk assessment (HRA) within 90 days of the member's enrollment. Zing Health aims to do the assessment within 60 days to identify patients with severe risks.
Thus kicks off the process of calling each patient to complete the HRA. But new members aren’t always available at the time of the call, which requires staff to make multiple attempts to contact the member. It's a time-consuming and expensive challenge for the organization, the company told Fierce Healthcare.
With Infinitus AI’s new patient-facing voice agent, Zing Health can automate patient calls to do the HRA. If patients need to call back to complete the assessment, the AI voice agent answers the phone and can complete the assessment with them at their convenience.
With the voice AI agents, Zing Health can complete more HRAs at the beginning of the cycle and get a jump-start on members’ care plans, Speidel said.
“The likelihood of us being able to identify unserved clinical needs and connect that individual to their new doctor and their model of care, we have a 2x likelihood of being successful,” Meghan Speidel, chief operating officer of Zing Health, said. “So it's really important, not just because it's a requirement of the program, but also within our model of care.”
Zing Health provides just one example of how Infinitus is deploying its newest hallucination-free AI voice agents, which the company announced Thursday. Started in 2019, Infinitus has automated more than 5 million calls in the last six years, representing 100 million minutes of time.
In the past, Infinitus has deployed its voice agents to ease communications between providers and insurers—to inquire about the status of a prior authorization, for example. But advancements in AI technology and additional guardrails have paved the path to a voice agent that is ready to assist patients.
“We're finally ready to have something that can be patient-facing, something that has the ability to be knowledgeable in a trusted and guardrailed way, something that can, in a predictable fashion, deliver trusted outcomes and something that can be used to make healthcare more proactive instead of reactive,” Ankit Jain, CEO and cofounder of Infinitus, told Fierce Healthcare.
One way Infinitus protects patients and keeps its AI consistent is through the creation of a “discrete action space,” a knowledge graph that Infinitus builds in partnership with each customer to put boundaries around what AI can and can’t talk about with patients.
The “breakthrough,” and patented, discrete action space is what allows the model to be hallucination-free, Jain said.
“Every institution has a different line in the sand about what they are OK with AI doing, and what they want their clinical teams to do,” Jain said.
Infinitus’ technology can verify information in real time with resources specific to the payer plan, treatment area or patient history. The company has also created automated post-processing for AI to evaluate the accuracy of the conversation. AI agents can also flag a human for questions outside of its scope.
“As a patient, the most important questions come after hours, when care teams are off duty or asleep,” Jain said in a statement. “AI agents can help reduce that anxiety and empower patients at any time, no matter where they are. But that can only happen when trust and accountability are built into the technology. We believe we are the first to deliver on the trust you should expect in healthcare at every level of our platform.”