In one call center in the Philippines, employees help Americans with diabetes or neurological disorders to resolve devices that follow their health. Sometimes they get urgent calls: older patients who are alone and experience a medical emergency.
“That is not part of the work of our employees or our technical support,” said Ruth Elio, a professional nurse who supervised the center employees when she spoke with KFF Health News last year. “Yet they do that because it is important.”
Elio also helped employees with their own health problems, usually headache or back pain, worn from a life of sitting for hours in a row.
In another call center, Kevin Asuncion transcribed medical visits from half a world, in the United States. You can get used to the hours, he said in an interview last year: 20.00 to 5 hours his breaks were usually spent with sleeping; There is not much open then.
Apart from health risks and night shifts, call center staff have a new care: artificial intelligence.
Startups are marketing of AI products with lifelike voices to plan or cancel medical visits, to fill regulations and help patients. Soon many patients will not be able to start contact with the health system by discussing a call center employee or receptionist, but with AI. Zocdoc, the company book company, has introduced an automated assistant who, according to him, can plan 70% of the time without a human intervention.
The medically oriented call center workforce in the Philippines is huge: 200,000 at the end of 2024, estimates Jack Madrid, the industrial trade growth leader. That figure is more than the number of paramedics in the United States at the end of 2023, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. And some employers open outdoor posts in other countries, such as India, while using AI to reform or replace their employees.
Yet it is unclear whether the digital manipulations of AI can match the proverbial human touch. For example one Recent Study In nature, medicine has established that although some models can diagnose ailments when they have presented a canned anecdote, as potential doctors do in training, AI struggles to generate information from simulated patients.
“The report, or the trust we give, or the emotions we have as people cannot be replaced,” said Elio.
Sachin Jain, president and CEO of Scan Health Plan, an insurer, said that people have context who does not have AI – at least for the time being. A receptionist in a small practice can know the patients well enough to pick up subtle signals and to communicate with the doctor that a certain caller is “someone you should see, talk, that day, that minute or that week.”
The turn of call centers, while creating more distance between a caller and a care provider, kept human touch. Yet some agents say in call centers and their proponents say that the ways in which they are followed undermine care during work. At a location of the Kaiser Permanente it is a “very micromanaging environment,” said a nurse who asked for her name not to give for fear of reprisals.
“From the start of the shift to your end, you are expected to be called after call after call from an open queue,” she said. Even when the advice gives for complex cases, “there is an unwritten rule about how long a nurse should take per call: 12 minutes.”
In the meantime, the work becomes more difficult, she said. “We are the back -up of the health care system. We are open 24/7,” she said. “They call about their incision sites, which bleed. Their child has asthma and the instructions for the medicines are not clear.”
One nursing association protests against a potential AI management tool in the call centers.
“Ai -tools do not make medical decisions,” Kaiser Permanent spokesperson Vincent Staupe told KFF Health News. “Our doctors and care teams are always central to decision -making with our patients and in all our care institutions, including call centers.”
Kaiser Permanente is not affiliated with KFF, a non -profit organization for health information with KFF Health News.
Some companies quote 30% to 50% revenue percentages – statistics that, according to some, say they are transferring the job to AI.
Call centers “cannot keep people, because it is just a real, really challenging job,” said Adnan Iqbal, co-founder and CEO of Luma Health, who creates AI products to automate some call center work. No wonder: “If you are shouted every 90 seconds by a patient, insurance company, an employee, what do you have.”
To hear the managers tell, their customers are frustrated: instead of the human touch, patients get nothing at all, impeded by long waiting times and hurried, powerful employees.
Once, Marissa Moore – an investor at Omers Ventures – received the frustrations of patients to try to plan a visit by telephone at five doctors offices. “In every one I received a third party who did not have an Intel on providers in the office, their availability or something.”
These types of complaints are increasingly common – and the attention of investors and companies.
Complaints of customers touch the bottom lines of companies – such as health insurers, that can be rewarded by the Medicare Advantage policy of the federal government for better customer service.
When Scan noticed a decrease in patient reviews for some medical care providers in his insurance network, it learned that the providers had switched to the use of centralized call centers. The customer service suffering and the lower reviews translated into lower payments from the federal government, said Jain.
“There is a certain degree of dissatisfaction that bubbles among our patients,” he said.
So for some companies the idea of a computer receptionist seems to be a welcome solution to the problem of ineffective call centers. Ai Voices, who can imitate convincingly human voices, are “beyond creepy valley,” said Richie Cartwright, the founder of Fella, a startup of weight loss that used one AI product to call pharmacies and ask if they had GLP-1 in stock.
The prices have also fallen. Google AIs price per use has fallen by 97%, CEO of the company Sundar Pichai claimed in a speech of 2024.
Some boosters are delighted to take AI assistants’ vision. Since the second Trump administration, policy initiatives of the Quasi-agency have known as the Ministry of Government Efficiency, led by Elon Musk, Reportedly investigated Use of artificial intelligence for customer service at the Ministry of Education.
Most managers interviewed by KFF Health News – in the hospital, insurance, technology and consultancy – wanted to emphasize that AI would supplement people would not replace it. Some resorted to jargon and claimed that the technology could make call center nurses and employees more efficient and effective.
But some companies indicate that their AI models could replace human employees. Their websites point to reducing dependence on staff. And they develop price strategies based on reducing the need for work, said Michael Yang, a venture capitalist at Omers.
Yang described the prospect for companies as a ‘We-Share-in-the-Upside type’, where startups pitch customers to pay them for the costs of 1½ recruitments and their AI do the work of twice that number.
But providers are currently building narrow services. For example, the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences started with a limited idea. The call center of the organization closes at 5 p.m. – which means that patients trying to cancel agreements after hours left a telephone message, which made a deficit for employees to tackle the next morning that took time from other planning tasks and canceled agreements. So they started using an AI system that is provided by Luma Health to allow cancellations after the hours and have since expanded to be able to cancel patients all day.
Michelle Winfeld-Hanrahan, the Chief Clinical Access Officer of the Health System, which supervises his commitment, said that UAMS has many ideas for more automation, including the allowance of patients to check earlier authorizations and to lead them through follow-up after dismissal.
Many managers claim that AI tools can supplement people instead of replacing. One company says that the product can measure “vocal biomarkers” – subtle changes in tone or bending – that correlate with illness and provide that information to human employees who interact with the patient. Some companies use large language models to summarize complex documents: to draw off obscure insurance policies, or required information for employees. Others are interested in AI who guides a person through a conversation.
Even if technology does not replace people, it reforms them. AI can be used to change the behavior and presentation of people. Call center employees said in interviews that they were aware or had heard or feared or feared or feared, a variety of AI tools.
In some Kaiser permanent call centers, the trade union workers protested – and successfully delayed – the implementation of an AI tool intended to measure ‘active listening’, a trade union pilot claimed.
And employees and managers who are related to the workforce of the call center in the Philippines said they had heard of other software tools, such as technology that changed Filipino accents to American. There is “no great need, given our relatively neutral accents, but we have seen that,” said Madrid, the trade growth leader.
“Only because something can be automated does not mean that it should be,” he said.
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