UnitedHealthcare Is Rolling Out Its AI Agent To 21 Million Members

Earlier this year, UnitedHealthcare announced the launch of Avery, an in-house AI companion that the company developed to improve patient and member experience. The goal with Avery is to help patients navigate otherwise involved experiences, including care coordination and cost-effectiveness comparisons, personalized care navigation, proactive transition-of-care support and insights on yearly health plan interactions. The roll-out was initially to 6.5 million members nationally across employer plans and an additional 160,000 members in Medicare Advantage plans. This week, the company announced that it would be expanding access to Avery for nearly 21 million members, signifying a massive expansion of the technology. Importantly, the company has noted that Avery is typically able to resolve nearly 90% of members’ questions and interactions, with the remaining 10% being sent to human specialists.

This marks a huge milestone for both United and the general health payor landscape, which has increasingly been in discussions regarding the role and place for AI in member interactions. A September report by the Boston Consulting Group found significant benefits to AI use by insurers. Beyond just member facing tools, insurers that have started using AI tools internally to help augment staff work were noted to gain nearly 10-20% in efficiency per employee. While member facing agents entail a prominent use-case, there are significant other opportunities that these companies are leaning on AI for. For example, claims reimbursement agents have been able to automate 60-80% of the process; for care approvals, nearly 40-60% automation; for fraud, waste and abuse detection, nearly 40-70% of processes are able to be automated.