Health insurer uses AI agents to sign doctor contracts 50 times faster

Health insurer Curative built an AI agent named Gwen that handles a doctor contract from first outreach to signature. The company says the process can take as little as one hour from web form to signed deal. It says the system signs provider contracts about 50 times faster than its team did in 2025, and a company feed puts the pace at more than 2,000 contracts a week.

Why Curative did it

Curative sells health insurance to employers. Last year it signed 2,100 provider contracts, twice as many as the year before. CEO Fred Turner said even that pace would mean a 30-year build for a national network. Hiring alone could not close the gap.

How the agents work

Gwen works one provider at a time, so nothing from other deals influences it. It researches a practice and proposes rates using purchased claims data and the price lists that insurers must now publish. Smaller agents check its work.

• A rate reviewer approves or rejects requests to go above the standard rate. It clears about two-thirds of them.
• Anything unusual goes to Turner, such as a big medical group or a odd request.
• A message checker reads every email or fax before it goes out. It was added after Gwen copied providers on internal notes about how high it could go.

Each contract takes about 20 million tokens, the units of text an AI system processes. Curative says that is roughly a tenth of the original cost. That makes small and solo practices worth pursuing, since the agent gives them the same attention as a hospital system.

Who it affects

Turner argues that speed helps small practices stay independent. If getting into a network and credentialed takes three months, he said, a new practice is not getting paid for three months. After signing, a separate agent checks the provider's licenses, and others load the contract so claims can be priced against it.

Curative's contracting team grew from 45 to about 55 people since Gwen launched. The company says each person is about 2.5 times as productive. Staff hand Gwen cold outreach and paperwork, then take over warm leads by phone.

The same approach is reaching claims disputes. Replies once took about 90 days. Curative says they now take under 30 minutes by email or fax, with a letter written for that specific claim instead of a mail-merged template.

What is not known

The figures come from Curative and its CEO, in a post by Anthropic, the maker of the Claude AI models behind the system. The material does not say how many contracts have been signed this year, how often providers push back, or how the contracts compare in quality with those signed by people.