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Comment by powvans | Hacker News Reader

Maybe. There are legitimate use cases. For example, data on what insurance a healthcare provider accepts is notoriously unreliable. There are startups that are using voice AI agents to call providers and ask them "hey are you still accepting these insurance plans?"

Obviously it would be great if the was a, ahem, legal consequence for not keeping this data up to date and available. But you know, if a frog had wings right?

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How is that a legit case? The providers will hang up. The bot will take a maybe and assume yes. Why on earth would you trust this task to an agent when the consequences of a "my mistake you are absolutely right to call that out" could be hundreds of thousands of dollars?

You know, it's pretty funny that we currently live in a world where it's much safer to trust AI with medical diagnosis than it is to trust AI to find and schedule a doctor visit for a human medical diagnosis.

Not saying to trust AI medical diagnoses. But the difference in risk (chance of failure times cost of failure) is surprisingly large, and in the wrong direction.

> could be hundreds of thousands of dollars?

Did you know that there are many, many steps between "do you take this insurance" and then someone performing hundreds of thousands of dollars of procedures on you?

Did you know that just going to a hospital for an emergency without checking it was in network can run you a 100k bill even if they do nothing but MRI and monitoring performed for one night?

You’re going to hit your out-of-network out-of-pocket max well before that. Will still be a big bill, but if you’re dying you won’t have much of a choice.

> data on what insurance a healthcare provider accepts is notoriously unreliable

To fix the health care system is possible.

To use AI to circumvent it just creates an incentive to make it worse. You spend more on AI, insurance companies spend even more money in surveillance to know who you are and to make things more complicated. It is a escalation that just ends making you spend more money to stay the same.

For example, data on what insurance a healthcare provider accepts is notoriously unreliable. There are startups that are using voice AI agents to call providers and ask them "hey are you still accepting these insurance plans?"

Why are you assembling a list of what health plans different doctors take? That sounds like a spamhaus scraping the real world for leads.

Every health care provider in America will tell you the same thing: "Call your insurance company to verify coverage." Every insurance company in America will tell you, "Call us to verify coverage."

Nobody outside of the patient, the doctor, and the payor (insurance company) has a need to know those things. Your "AI agent" certainly does not.

Because I want to go to the doctor and I don't want to personally call n shithole private equity owned chain practices myself to find out if they take my insurance and are accepting new patients?

There are healthcare concierge services for this, my job offers one, which I use any time I need something like this.

You're going about it backwards.

Your insurance company has a list of the doctors who take your insurance. That's their job. They have people who do nothing but that every day for their work.

In your rush to be correct you seem to have missed the second sentence of my comment. I’m indeed using someone whose whole job is to do this.

lol same for me, I work for AssemblyAI

and still see when I call Dentist, they tell me check with health insurance and ask them add us to portal then I call Dentist again and then make an appointment.

This whole cycle needs to be automated and will be soon!!

Same here, I work for AssemblyAI and still encounter the same problem. When I call a dentist, they tell me to check with my health insurance and ask me to add us to the portal. Then I have to call the dentist again to make an appointment.

This entire cycle should be automated soon.

In that case the startups should be able to defend themselves against the social stigma - "sure, there's a stigma against doing this, but here's why we think it's worthwhile anyway in this case".

That sounds like a terrible use-case unless there’s already a pre-existing relationship with the provider, and it seems questionable even then.

Clearly you've never had shitty insurance and a need for a doctor. I've spent multiple hours on the phone trying to find someone that takes my insurance. It's an actual problem.

It will be more of a problem if 100 idiotic startups are cold-calling doctors offices via their AI agents.

It’s already often difficult to get a human on the phone.

Sounds like the doc office should just list what they accept on their website then, god forbid.

It is absolutely a problem. One that will not be solved with LLMs.

I don't think the parent comment disagrees with it being a problem. I read it as more: the use of an agent doesn't resolve the ambiguity in the underlying problem but instead injects another variable that could further misrepresent whether the person has valid insurance coverage (e.g. hallucinating or misunderstanding the nature or extent of coverage).

I've spent multiple hours on the phone trying to find someone that takes my insurance.

Go to the insurance company web site.

Several years ago a law was passed requiring insurance companies to keep their provider lists accurate and up-to-date.

There's a regulatory window for freshness, and every insurance company web site is required by law to show you when the data was last updated.

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