HealthCare.com focused on growth following $180 million funding round

[Insurance Forums Staff]

Insurance Forums Staff submitted a new article

HealthCare.com focused on growth following $180 million funding round

Financing accelerates the development of HealthCare.com’s AI platform to drive further direct-to-consumer healthcare product innovation and rapidly scale to address what it calls a “massive market opportunity.”

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[somarco]

Health care and health care funding is about more than price.

Can a computer be programmed to answer "what if" questions? Can a computer answer questions about claim denials?

Having the ability to write new business while you sleep sounds great, but when it comes to health insurance, many have questions that require 2-way dialogue, not popup robo-assistants who will eventually transfer you to a real person.

 

[scagnt83]

Can a computer be programmed to answer "what if" questions? Can a computer answer questions about claim denials?

To an extent, yes they can. To what extent depends on the depth of programming they have. The tech is still fairly new and it would take a very long time for even a team of people to cover all the variables and answers to all the possibilities.

I played around with an assistant chatbot for my websites once. Given enough time, you could create a very interactive and in-depth experience. The issue is that its just like a website, it takes the knowledge of the agent to create the content needed for a quality site. Same with a chatbot. A computer programmer is only capable of doing so much themselves, mainly customer service/administrative type of tasks. But to answer the real insurance questions, an actual agent has to be heavily involved. That is why so many of the "help bots" are so useless. For an insurance carrier, they would have to cover so much info it would be a multi-year undertaking (Im sure its in the works). For an agent or agency, it would cost a ton of money to hire a programmer to go through all the various Q&As... especially covering all the various follow up questions by the client after the initial answer is given by the bot. Plus all the time invested by the agent to provide the info needed.

At first I thought "this would be easy". Then I realized how many branches each question needs when you get into follow up questions and responses to those. For a single agent it would easily take a years worth of back and forth with a programmer to get a decent product. There are programs that make it easy and you dont have to be an actual programmer, they are pretty easy to figure out, but that is even more time invested.

Give it another 5 or 10 years and I think the tech will be very impressive compared to now. But no getting around the fact that an expert must commit a very large amount of time to provide relevant info. At some point we will probably be able to subscribe to insurance assistants who are preprogrammed for our niche.

 

[LeeV]

I went to their website and went through the process. After answering some basic questions, it generated a listing of policies that would be available to me and that an agent would be contacting me soon.

 

[somarco]

I went to their website and went through the process. After answering some basic questions, it generated a listing of policies that would be available to me and that an agent would be contacting me soon.

Let us know which policies you will be buying from HAL 9000 . . .

Give it another 5 or 10 years and I think the tech will be very impressive compared to now.

 

[LeeV]

lol, great movie.

 

[AZDave]

After they burn thru their pile of cash, they will then realize that they need the independent agent distribution channel.