VoiceCare AI, a new agentic AI startup, launched to automate the back-office conversations between providers and payers and ease the administrative burdens for healthcare staff.
The company developed an enterprise-grade AI platform to automate routine phone conversations and tedious, time-consuming tasks for healthcare companies for benefit verification, prior authorization, claims management, prescription support and other such use cases.
VoiceCare AI also started piloting its technology at Mayo Clinic to tackle patient pre-authorization and benefit confirmations within its neurology and pediatrics departments and medical and administrative support operations, the company announced Friday.
Parag Jhaveri, founder and CEO of VoiceCare AI, described the startup as a "healthcare administration general intelligence company" that can improve operational efficiency and enable healthcare staff to focus on high-order patient care.
"We are essentially automating these business-to-business back-office conversations and we're also 'super staffing' the workforce through the application of AI," he said in an exclusive interview with Fierce Healthcare about the company's launch. "Rather than humans having to spend this inordinate amount of time making these phone calls that are about 3.2 billion in the U.S. healthcare system, and more than 90% of healthcare-related calls are still being handled manually between humans."
VoiceCare AI dubbed its voice AI agent "Joy," and the agent is capable of supporting long, complex, and highly nuanced conversations and extended hold times, Jhaveri said.
Healthcare administration in the United States currently accounts for $1 trillion of the $4.5 trillion total healthcare spend, according to research from McKinsey & Company.
Healthcare staff spend countless hours on calls with long hold times occur in the healthcare system, transferring and copying data, verifying statuses and follow-ups, or starting a process.
Jhaveri said the company's Joy voice AI agent can navigate calls as short as a few minutes to calls as long as three hours. The company has found, through testing, that the agent can hold on to the calls for up to two and a half hours. (Why holding for two-and-a-half hours is necessary to take care of tedious administrative work in healthcare is a conversation for another day.)
"It can navigate IVR (interactive voice response). It can speak to multiple humans when transfers happen, all on the same conversation," he said.
VoiceCare AI has raised $3.8 million in funding from investors including Caduceus Capital Partners and Bread and Butter Ventures. The funding will support team expansion, sales and marketing efforts, and continued investment in enhancing platform accuracy, security and compliance, Jhaveri said.
Jhaveri has been an operator, startup advisor and an investor in healthcare. His experience spans business development at KPMG, McKesson and Accenture as well as investing and venture capital.
He observed the routine, time-consuming work that administrative staff face every day and saw opportunities to use technology to improve the process.
Jhaveri said he spent nine months making back-office phone calls and performing the tasks of a healthcare administrative assistant, in partnership with a healthcare provider. "That was the most painful thing I've done," he said. "One call, I distinctly remember I had to hold on for 53 minutes."
Health tech startups are capitalizing on advances in generative AI to address long-standing administrative pain points.
Clinicians spend nearly 28 hours per week on administrative tasks, while medical office staff and claims staff spend 34 and 36 hours, respectively, according to a survey conducted by Google and the Harris Poll.
Jhaveri and his team spent two years building the technology and it has been rolled out to a few multi-physician practices, he noted.
VoiceCare AI's platform was designed to handle payer communication, from benefits verification to prior authorizations and claims follow-ups. It maintains detailed documentation and a call summary of every interaction. The system is designed to integrate with existing workflows and provides near real-time status updates.
"With voice AI, the technology has leapfrogged so much that they are very conversational in nature and can handle conversations that are simple and medium complexity. When you're making a transactional call, it's clear inputs and clear outputs. When you call an insurance company, you are verifying somebody's insurance verification, or you're doing prior auth," Jhaveri said. "With the advent of generative AI, the speech-to-text and the text-to-speech and the LLMs (large language models) have become very advanced that you are able to have a very fluid and dynamic conversation, and also the cost has come down dramatically to support a technology like that."
The company says its technology leverages advanced multi-modal, multimodal agentic architecture with reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) and proprietary healthcare conversational data to achieve a high call completion accuracy rate, with a majority of calls completed autonomously using AI.
The platform is HIPAA compliant and SOC 2 Type II attested.
VoiceCare AI joins a growing list of startups using generative AI and voice agents to tackle routine, tedious healthcare tasks.
Infinitus Systems, a five-year-old company backed by Andreessen Horowitz and GV, offers an AI platform specifically built to automate manual healthcare phone calls. The company picked up a $51.5 million series C last year and has raised $102.9 million to date.
Startup Hello Patient built generative AI call agents to do the work of traditional support staff, freeing them up for more valuable, patient-facing work. SuperDial provides voice AI solutions for healthcare and last year it acquired MajorBoost to enhance its AI-powered phone automation.
Healthcare automation solutions company Medsender launched an AI-powered voice agent for patient communication.
Hyro AI, a healthcare-specific no-code platform for AI-powered call centers, brought in $35 million in an extension of its series B round in December.
Hippocratic AI is a newer startup that built a staffing marketplace to enable health systems, payers and others to “hire” generative-AI-powered agents to conduct low-risk, non-diagnostic, patient-facing services.
Jhaveri said VoiceCare AI has built a team with extensive experience in end-to-end speech systems and voice AI agents. The company also has proprietary healthcare conversational data and developed its own healthcare data annotation and labeling platform, he noted.
"Every conversation is actually labeled and analyzed and annotated both through models and human in the loop," he said, noting that enables continuous improvement of the platform.
"We've also built the company in a way that's the best of both worlds. Our U.S. headquarters with India being the data science and data engineering, and this was built by design. We also have deep integration experience in healthcare, and that is a big deal when it comes to healthcare," Jhaveri said.
"Voicecare's technology has potential to empower clinical and healthcare staffing teams to focus on patient care and alleviate administrative burdens,” said Mary Grove, managing partner at VoiceCare AI investor Bread and Butter Ventures. “They are attempting to solve pain points we've all experienced as patients and driving value for patients, providers, and payers.