Collective Health, a transparent third-party administrator, has launched a new AI-powered system in collaboration with Google Cloud that aims to make it easier for members to understand their benefits.
San Francisco-based Collective Health serves employers and supports them in managing medical, dental and vision plans, and provides a digital app for employees to help them navigate care and find providers.
The new AI-powered system is called Collective AI. It can answer common questions about benefits for members, such as whether their plan is still active or how they can access their ID cards. The tool also supports Collective Health’s customer service representatives by pulling up relevant information during calls and providing real-time documentation. For employers, it will reduce the burden of annual enrollment and plan implementation by providing plan design insights.
“We launched [Collective AI] because we see AI as a foundational utility, much like cloud computing, that allows us to solve the structural friction that manual processes never could,” said Ali Diab, CEO and co-founder of Collective Health, in an email. “By building this intelligence directly into our core infrastructure, we’re ensuring that healthcare administration finally functions with the same reliability and precision as any other modern enterprise system.”
Google Cloud is providing the technology infrastructure that powers Collective AI and allows it to run safely in a healthcare setting.
“Healthcare requires a unique balance of rapid innovation and an uncompromising commitment to data privacy and user safety,” said Aashima Gupta, global director of healthcare strategy and solutions at Google Cloud, in a statement. “By choosing Google Cloud to help deliver CAI™, Collective Health is able to deploy sophisticated generative AI models on a foundation built for privacy, scale, and reliability.”
Collective AI was built using a privacy-by-design framework, meaning privacy protections were built into the system from the beginning, not added later. This ensures that employee health data is protected and not used to train external foundational models, according to the announcement.
In launching Collective AI, Collective Health hopes to move away from a “collection of fragmented tools” and towards a “single, reliable system,” Diab said.
“As a TPA, we have a unique advantage: we don’t just see the ‘front-end’ questions members ask; we understand the underlying logic of the entire plan — from eligibility to the final claim,” he said. “We are utilizing CAI™ as a foundational capability across our entire platform to turn that data advantage into a more predictable experience. By automating the dense, manual ‘plumbing’ of administration — like plan-specific search and documentation — we can replace the traditional ‘black box’ of insurance with a system that functions with the same transparency and efficiency as any other modern enterprise infrastructure.”
Photo: ismagilov, Getty Images
