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An AI agent signs 100 contracts daily
The contract problem
A new health plan has to contract with the doctors and hospitals in its network, about 1.2 million of them in the US, which works out to 60,000 to 70,000 contracts. Blue Cross built its network over 100 years and United over about 50. Curative has a team of about 45 people who reach out to providers and negotiate.
How Gwen works
Gwen starts from a lead, such as a primary care office and its address. She researches the practice, checks what other payers pay it using public transparency files, finds an email address through ZoomInfo, and sends customized emails, following up repeatedly until the office answers. She negotiates rates over several rounds and redlines the language by writing Python, because models are terrible at editing Word documents directly. Then she opens the DocuSign link and signs with the CEO's signature.
The team did 2,300 contracts in the last year. In about eight weeks, Gwen alone has done 3,500. A contract cost $1,500 to $2,000 on average with people and about $70 with Gwen. She sends about 15,000 emails a day, and many providers come around on the ninth email, more follow-ups than a person would send.
What people still do
The human team now works on the bigger contracts. Large hospital systems and doctor groups want phone calls and in-person meetings. Many small providers, including individual primary care doctors, behavioral health providers, and therapists, will do the whole deal over email, and Gwen can finish one in a few hours.
How do insurers build provider networks?
A provider network is the set of doctors and hospitals that have signed contracts with an insurer to accept agreed rates. Each contract sets prices for services, along with billing rules and terms for how disputes get settled. Large insurers built their networks over decades through repeated negotiations and renewals. A new plan has to recreate that web of agreements from scratch before its members can see anyone in network.
Why are other payers' rates public?
The federal Transparency in Coverage rule, which took effect in July 2022, requires most health plans to post the rates they negotiate with providers in machine-readable files. A separate hospital price transparency rule from 2021 requires hospitals to publish their prices. These files are huge and hard for people to read, which is why software that parses them is useful. They let a new insurer see roughly what competitors pay a given practice.
Why do language models struggle with Word files?
A Word document is a zipped bundle of XML files, and the text on a page is split into many small runs, each with its own formatting tags. Changing a sentence can mean editing several runs while keeping styles, comments, and tracked changes intact. Libraries such as python-docx expose that structure through code. A script gives a model exact control where free-form editing of the file would not.
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