Earlier this year, UnitedHealthcare unveiled Avery, a generative AI companion aimed at supporting care coordination for its members.

At the time, the tool was available to about 6.5 million of its members in employer plans and 160,000 people enrolled in Medicare Advantage. Now, the insurer is expanding access to 21 million of its members, growing the tool's reach at a faster clip than was initially expected.

To date, the company has found that Avery has resolved 90% of its member interactions, and in the remaining 10% of cases, can complete a handoff to a human advocate to offer member support.

"As we're seeing some of the statistics and some of the feedback that we're getting from users around the success we've had within the early phases of Avery, it's just making sense to open up that application into more and more of the population," Craig Kurtzweil, chief data and analytics officer at UnitedHealthcare, told Fierce Healthcare.

He said that a key piece of what makes Avery work is that it's built on "ground truth systems" that create a critical data foundation for the platform as it sits on top of the data available through UnitedHealthcare. With that data layer powering Avery's interactions, members get better answers, Kurtzweil said.

That accuracy is critical to helping members build trust with the tool and use it most effectively. Avery can provide key details on deductibles, out-of-pocket maximums, provider networks, pricing and claims processing, Kurtzweil said.

"Making this as accurate as possible is a big piece of gaining that trust with the consumers," he said.

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