Strategies to address new TCPA rules for interactive voice response (IVR) solutions

Effective July 20, 2023, the Federal Communications Commission added call limits and opt-out requirements for artificial or prerecorded voice calls made to residential telephone lines. Health plans are now required to obtain prior express consent before making calls to residential lines. Our CultureGuide® solution addresses Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) rules, and abides by the standards currently in place.

Recommendations to health plans seeking to continue to use IVR Solutions

As health plans rapidly develop new strategies to obtain prior express consent from members, SameSky Health can help.

Each touchpoint with a member provides an opportunity to collect consent for interactive voice response (IVR) communications. An example of this is to collect consent during the member enrollment process, or during member services calls. With CultureGuide, each member’s personalized health journey is created and tailored based on the information we know as provided by the health plan, or that we discover along the way through our interactions with each member. CultureGuide leverages this collected data across all modalities within each member’s profile. 

When we engage with health plans, one of the first steps in our process is to vet the member profile data provided by the health plan. We quickly identify all available outreach methods, including phone type.

For those members whose preferred method of communication is through a landline, we deploy our multimodal communications approach, often leveraging our Community Health Guides — a team of live agents — enabling us to obtain prior express consent from members. 

When communicating with members via our cognitive IVR solution, the CultureGuide Virtual Health Assistant, we have an opt-out process in place that is similar to other modalities such as text. The bidirectional data exchange built within CultureGuide ensures that each member’s profile remains up-to-date between the health plan and SameSky Health, including opt-out and do-not-call requests. This coordinated approach ensures that health plans have the latest opt-in and opt-out information for their members to maintain compliance across all communication channels.

New limits are soon to go into effect, restricting the number of artificial or prerecorded voice calls permitted to residential telephone lines. CultureGuide is specifically designed to maximize the impact of each member touchpoint, driving desired health actions — without overwhelming members with excessive communications, or exceeding regulatory limits.

What makes CultureGuide unique?

• Adaptive technology
  Our proprietary, dynamic logic determines appropriate messaging and preferred communications modalities throughout the member’s annual health journey, contextualizing messaging based on each unique circumstance.

• Cultural intelligence
  Our development process ensures that we look at culture through a holistic lens, informing every aspect of our platform, and our content. Beyond technology, our Community Health Guides interact with members, informed by their own diverse cultural backgrounds.

• Continuous improvement
  Extensive testing of our interactions allows us to optimize our content, while feedback from members informs updates to our culturally relevant messaging.

• Personalized experience
  The more we learn about each member during their annual health journey, the more personalized our engagement becomes, enabling us to build trusted, influential relationships. We are able to decrease communication burnout while maximizing health outcomes, which has proven to help achieve desired health actions, such as the completion of Annual Wellness Visits. View recent case studies.

• Virtual Health Assistant (cognitive IVR)
  Our Virtual Health Assistant delivers a culturally tailored, nuanced approach to members at scale. We leverage artificial intelligence (AI) to synthesize speaking voices to create interactions that are more conversational in nature, recognizing natural responses in multiple languages to deliver the high quality dynamic content that is personalized for each member.

Contact us today to learn more about CultureGuide and how to address the new TCPA rules now in effect.