The Stack Overflow Podcast

AI agents that help doctors get paid

Episode Summary

On this episode, Ben and Ryan chat with Dan Parsons,  co-founder and Chief Experience Officer at Thoughtful AI. He’s on a mission to fix  improve the U.S. health care system, using AI to simplify how providers get paid by insurance companies. They cover the difficulties in navigating legacy systems that don’t have great interfaces, how humans might not be the best users of computers, and why patching a broken system is the first step in fixing it.

Episode Notes

Thoughtful AI provides AI agents that help revenue cycle management (RCM) teams get providers their money from insurance companies. 

Does AI have a better bedside manner than doctors? One study suggest they do. 

Connect with Dan on X and LinkedIn

Congrats to Populist badge winner Marcio Mazzucato for doing the accepted answer one better on How do I emulate a 403 error page?.

Want a preview? Here are some great quotes from this episode: 

“ The human transformation of getting off of this computer platform and back out into the world and back out into trying to advance, some of the existential, whether it's risks or opportunities or threats, but get away from this huge workforce sitting in front of computers. We also have this fundamental belief that humans actually aren't great at operating computers, but other computers are really good at it.”

“ We find the average RCM team has attrition rates of 10 to 40%, which is three to 10X other industries. So they already have a leaky bucket. They are actually understaffed. They are having trouble keeping up. So for us, it's more about adding abundance of capacity at a much more lower cost that a higher quality that will allow them to be more financially sound organizations. I know there's a lot of conversation about replacing the actual human. Yeah, of course. There are folks out there who organizations will look and say, Hey, if you're just sitting there moving data around and you're not very good at it and you hate that job and like it's hard to staff and train, it's going to make a lot of sense to replace with an AI solution.”

“ We think our mission is to fix the healthcare system, not to duct tape the current environment. And we have multiple acts in our mission to achieve that. And I completely align. It is the broken down institutions. That is actually what's driving a lot of the problem. We do have to get closer to the metal or we do have to get closer to the systematic changes. And, that's likely going to require some big movement as it relates to how the money moves.”