Approving a Doctor for an Insurance Network Now Takes 12 Hours and 20 Cents
Curative replaced a five-person paperwork department with an AI agent that verifies licenses, transcripts, and malpractice records.
20VC with Harry Stebbings · We Built Our Own Salesforce in Months. Here's Why We're Cancelling the $600K Contract | Curative CEOVerifying a doctor to join a health insurance network now takes about 12 hours and costs about 20 cents.
That check, called credentialing, used to take two to three months and cost about $50. Fred Turner, the chief executive of health insurer Curative, says it required a person to visit a medical board website to confirm the license, pull school transcripts, search malpractice records, and then stamp an approval.
Curative built an in-house software agent that runs on Claude, an artificial intelligence model, and does the work end to end. It visits the sites, reads the documents, assembles the file, and marks it approved.
The credentialing department, once five or six people, is now down to zero. For doctors, who Turner says hate waiting months before they can see patients, the difference is less paperwork and a faster start.
Questions people ask
Does faster mean less thorough?
No. The checks are the same, confirming a valid medical license, education, and malpractice history. The agent just does the looking up and assembling in hours instead of having people click through websites for months.
What is Claude?
Claude is a large language model made by Anthropic. In this case, it powers an agent, meaning software that can use websites, read documents, and complete multistep office work, not just answer questions.
How can it cost only 20 cents?
The 20 cents is largely the computing cost of running the AI, versus paying people for hours of manual checking. Turner did not break out oversight or software upkeep, so it is best read as the direct cost per check.