eHealth Elevates the Medicare Experience — From Enrollment to Support — with Always-on Voice AI
eHealth is a leading private health insurance marketplace, helping Americans compare health plans from over 50 regional and national insurers for Medicare Advantage. As a leading health insurance agency, eHealth cares deeply about making sure beneficiaries can access coverage via the channel they prefer, whether that’s online or by phone.
“In collaboration with Regal AI, we’ve made the enrollment experience for Medicare Advantage beneficiaries faster and simpler. The screener agent scales instantly when demand surges, with after-hours calls performing on par with our best agents. The result is giving beneficiaries better service with shorter wait times while empowering our human agents to focus on high-value enrollments.”
eHealth’s AI agent ensured every after-hours call was answered instantly, earned exceptional ratings, and 27% increased purchase interest compared to human screener agents*.
*Internal eHealth analysis of after-hours Medicare calls served by AI agents, 2025
More than 34 million Americans are enrolled in Medicare Advantage plans. Every year during the Medicare Annual Enrollment Period (AEP), Medicare Advantage marketplaces experience spikes in seasonal volume from customers looking to enroll in a health plan. For eHealth, that results in a massive seasonal spike in demand. During AEP, inbound call volume surges significantly, prompting the company to hire and train hundreds of agents in a matter of weeks.
eHealth needed a solution that could scale seamlessly during peak volume, including screening inbound calls, qualifying prospects in real time, and transferring qualified leads to licensed insurance agents without requiring additional headcount or keeping beneficiaries waiting. In response, eHealth in 2025 launched Alice, its AI-powered voice agent. Alice has expanded beyond its initial providing shopping and enrollment telephone support and is now assisting with post-enrollment and general service calls from Medicare beneficiaries.
During open enrollment, eHealth needed more than a conversational AI — it needed infrastructure built to handle massive call surges with precision and reliability. “When you’re managing thousands of health insurance calls a day, speed is easy to find,” said Ketan Babaria, Chief Digital and AI Officer at eHealth. “What’s hard is finding speed with accuracy. Every disclosure must be right, and every record has to be in sync. That’s where most systems break.”
Regal’s platform gave eHealth both the scalability and control it needed. With unlimited dialing concurrency and a native session initiation protocol (SIP) integration, eHealth’s AI screener Alice managed peak-hour overflow and after-hours calls seamlessly, and transferring qualified leads to licensed agents in real time with full context preserved. Built-in A/B testing allowed eHealth to validate changes safely before scaling, while deterministic “say exactly” nodes, auditable scripting, and CRM-synced logging ensured every call met compliance standards set by eHealth. “Alice performs like our best agent every time,” added Atul Kumar, Vice President of Product & AI at eHealth.
That reliability was complemented by Regal’s embedded implementation model, which paired eHealth with a dedicated Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) to oversee every step of the deployment, from building and testing to monitoring and iterating. The close collaboration enabled rapid improvements and ensured enterprise-grade reliability from day one. “It wasn’t just a vendor relationship,” said Kumar. “Our FDE worked alongside us — debugging, refining agent logic, and optimizing telephony flows until we had a system we could trust to scale.”
Together, Regal and eHealth created a foundation that scaled instantly, kept compliance at the forefront, and delivered a faster, more consistent experience for customers.
More than 34 million Americans are enrolled in Medicare Advantage plans. Every year during the Medicare Annual Enrollment Period (AEP), Medicare Advantage marketplaces experience spikes in seasonal volume from customers looking to enroll in a health plan. For eHealth, that results in a massive seasonal spike in demand. During AEP, inbound call volume surges significantly, prompting the company to hire and train hundreds of agents in a matter of weeks.
eHealth needed a solution that could scale seamlessly during peak volume, including screening inbound calls, qualifying prospects in real time, and transferring qualified leads to licensed insurance agents without requiring additional headcount or keeping beneficiaries waiting. In response, eHealth in 2025 launched Alice, its AI-powered voice agent. Alice has expanded beyond its initial providing shopping and enrollment telephone support and is now assisting with post-enrollment and general service calls from Medicare beneficiaries.
During open enrollment, eHealth needed more than a conversational AI — it needed infrastructure built to handle massive call surges with precision and reliability. “When you’re managing thousands of health insurance calls a day, speed is easy to find,” said Ketan Babaria, Chief Digital and AI Officer at eHealth. “What’s hard is finding speed with accuracy. Every disclosure must be right, and every record has to be in sync. That’s where most systems break.”
Regal’s platform gave eHealth both the scalability and control it needed. With unlimited dialing concurrency and a native session initiation protocol (SIP) integration, eHealth’s AI screener Alice managed peak-hour overflow and after-hours calls seamlessly, and transferring qualified leads to licensed agents in real time with full context preserved. Built-in A/B testing allowed eHealth to validate changes safely before scaling, while deterministic “say exactly” nodes, auditable scripting, and CRM-synced logging ensured every call met compliance standards set by eHealth. “Alice performs like our best agent every time,” added Atul Kumar, Vice President of Product & AI at eHealth.
That reliability was complemented by Regal’s embedded implementation model, which paired eHealth with a dedicated Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) to oversee every step of the deployment, from building and testing to monitoring and iterating. The close collaboration enabled rapid improvements and ensured enterprise-grade reliability from day one. “It wasn’t just a vendor relationship,” said Kumar. “Our FDE worked alongside us — debugging, refining agent logic, and optimizing telephony flows until we had a system we could trust to scale.”
Together, Regal and eHealth created a foundation that scaled instantly, kept compliance at the forefront, and delivered a faster, more consistent experience for customers.
Regal’s AI screener helped eHealth manage the surge of inbound calls during the Annual Enrollment Period by handling overflow and after-hours volume human teams couldn’t reach. The result was faster qualification, stronger compliance, and a more consistent experience for beneficiaries.
Scalable foundation for dynamic growth
As eHealth continues to evolve, Regal’s AI ensures its operations can keep pace without adding headcount. During the Annual Enrollment Period, AI drove a 100% answer rate by seamlessly absorbing overflow call volume, ensuring screening, and routing eligible leads to licensed insurance agents with full context preserved. Backed by Regal’s dialer architecture with unlimited concurrency and low-latency SIP transfers to eHealth’s contact center, the system maintained instant response times even at 100x peak demand. Human agents were freed from repetitive qualification and dead-air calls, allowing them to focus on providing assistance with plan selection and enrollments. The result is a scalable, reliable foundation built to support future growth and maintain responsiveness year-round.
Beneficiary insights that drive continuous improvement
With human-led calls, capturing valuable insights were often more labor intensive, including manual post-call logging. With Regal’s AI, every conversation now generates structured insights automatically. Those insights flow into Regal Improve, Regal’s analytics engine that turns call data into actionable intelligence. eHealth can now analyze language distribution, top reasons for calling, and performance trends across workflows, helping the team identify where to invest, like expanding Spanish-language support and optimizing plan-switch handling to reduce drop-offs.
Regal Improve also surfaced ways to make service more empathetic and efficient. Calls from beneficiaries reporting a spouse’s passing are now handled automatically with an API-triggered removal from outreach lists, replacing what used to be a delayed manual process. Long disclaimer statements were made more concise and shifted later in the call flow, improving transfer and containment rates while keeping interactions adherent. By capturing and analyzing every AI-led conversation, eHealth can continuously refine operations and deliver a smoother, more human member experience at scale.
Compliance built into every call
In healthcare, every conversation carries regulatory weight. eHealth needed an AI solution that could automate complex screening workflows while meeting rigorous security and compliance standards, extending beyond HIPAA and SOC 2 with the intent to protect every member interaction. The AI executes approved disclosures and statements exactly as written, with deterministic prompting and full conversational logging for auditability. Every interaction is traceable by design, giving eHealth the confidence to scale automation in one of the most tightly regulated industries.
Faster, more consistent experiences
With Regal’s AI handling overflow and after-hours calls, beneficiaries reach an agent instantly — no hold music or voicemails. Conversations are shorter and smoother, with average call time substantially reduced compared to that with human screeners, while full context carries through to licensed insurance agents. The result is faster access to shopping assistance and more consistent service, with 77% of consumers rating calls as “exceptional.”.
For eHealth’s qualification flows — filled with conditional paths and branching logic — testing the AI agent looked nothing like testing traditional software. “You can’t quality test this like traditional software code,” said Jordan Chin, Forward Deployed Engineer at Regal. “AI doesn’t break because it can’t handle a yes or no. It breaks when someone elaborates the dialogue, beyond the question asked, prior to sharing their name. That’s what we test for. And that’s what makes the AI resilient in production.”
The team learned to prioritize real-world reliability over theoretical perfection. They refined prompt logic after hearing how callers spoke, re-sequenced disclosures to reduce hang-ups, and introduced cold transfers during peak volume to shorten handle time while keeping AI call summaries rich with context for licensed insurance agents. “Every decision came from live data,” said Kumar. “Once we externalized logic — like initial checks or plan eligibility — into deterministic functions, the system became more predictable and easier to audit.”
By focusing on real-world behavior instead of scripted scenarios, eHealth improved transfer and containment rates with each iteration. “We weren’t guessing what to fix — we were looking at real conversations, real drop-offs, and real data,” said Kumar. Weekly reviews of live calls turned every enrollment cycle into a chance to learn and refine. “Once we had real data coming in, improvement became part of the rhythm,” Kumar added. “It’s not like retraining hundreds of agents — every update scales automatically and the benefit compounds.”
After the success of its AI screener, eHealth is extending Regal’s AI agents across the entire customer journey. eHealth recently expanded its voice-based AI customer support agent to assist Medicare beneficiaries after enrollment. Alice now helps beneficiaries check application status, understand when to expect ID cards, find billing contacts, and process Do Not Call requests automatically through Regal’s platform. By resolving these common inquiries instantly and handing off complex cases to human agents with full context, Alice delivers faster, more consistent support while reducing repetitive workloads for service teams.
Beyond customer qualification and support, eHealth is expanding Regal’s AI to power new use cases across its operations. Upcoming agents will automate outbound calls, schedule follow-ups and appointments, and manage claims status inquiries to reduce inbound volume for service teams. Each new use case builds on the same foundation — instant response, seamless transfers, and embedded compliance — to ensure reliability and consistency across every member touchpoint.
“The AI screener showed us what’s possible,” said Ketan. “Once you see the efficiency and accuracy hold at scale, you start thinking about every part of the business that could benefit from that same foundation. The goal isn’t just automation for its own sake — it’s using AI to make the member experience smoother and more efficient.”
Forward-Looking Statements
This press release contains statements that are forward-looking statements as defined within the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements in this press release include, but are not limited to, the following: our expectations and predictions for our digital strategy and capabilities, our investments in technology and digital initiatives, including artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities, and our ability to achieve such strategic objectives; consumer expectation and adoption of online and other digital product and service offerings, including AI-based services; and other statements regarding our business, operations, financial condition, prospects and business strategies.
Our expectations and beliefs regarding these matters may not materialize, and actual results in future periods are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected. These risks include those set forth in our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including our latest Form 10-Q and 10-K. The forward-looking statements in this press release are based on information available to us as of the date hereof, and we disclaim any obligation to update any forward-looking statements, except as required by law.
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