Meet Rita — the AI now running the front desk at a Rio Grande Valley clinic ​

When patients walk into the Valley Diabetes & Endocrinology Comprehensive Center in Weslaco this month, they’ve got a new option at the front desk — an artificial intelligence-powered agent avatar named Rita. 

A video avatar of Rita will stand in the waiting room, connected to a camera, a high-powered computer, and a card scanner. She can verify insurance, accept payment, and answer pre-programmed procedural questions. 

Rita is not only bilingual in Spanish and English, but she’s also programmed to understand and communicate in 100 different languages, read facial expressions to determine the patient’s mood or reaction, and seamlessly create a single electronic health record, which is updated each time the patient visits. 

She was developed by College Station-based technology startup Humanate Digital, which uses high-powered computing chips in partnership with NVIDIA and an artificial intelligence system trained on specialized healthcare data to answer patient questions 24 hours a day.

The AI agent Rita is coming to the Rio Grande Valley as a strategic partnership with Texas A&M’s Rural Medicine program. 

That’s because Dr. Eduardo “Dusty” Luna, an endocrinologist specializing in diabetes care, is a partner at the Valley Diabetes & Endocrinology Comprehensive Center and reached out to the technology startup about integrating her skills into the medical practice. Luna is both an alum of Texas A&M and a Valley native. 

“There’s always the struggle of running a private practice; ultimately, you want to be able to help as many people as you can. But you have so many phone calls coming in, in the front office and the back office, then paperwork. We wanted to bridge that gap and find a solution,” Luna told the Rio Grande Valley Business Journal. 

Luna joined the practice about six years ago, when it had a handful of employees, and it has since grown to three locations in Weslaco, Mission, and Edinburg, with more than 50 employees. 

“And we’re hoping to continue to expand,” he said. 

The AI agent Rita is supposed to be different from the chatbots of a few years ago and offer more personalized care, he said.  

“There’s that human touch, where it can recognize expressions and be able to talk to you in a way that you could appreciate, but also identify if there’s a frustration,” he said. 

The model is trained to respond within a professional framework of medical industry knowledge, and when it can’t find the exact answer or is unsure, it will not make up information, a common issue known as AI hallucinations. It does not offer any medical advice, either. 

And she’s not meant to replace employees, executives say; instead, she’s meant to handle the majority of patient workflow and enable workers to spend more time with individuals who need extra guidance or have more complex needs. It’s meant to reduce the administrative burden and alleviate medical staff burnout from answering hundreds of calls a day, or waiting on hold with insurance for a pre-authorization for several hours, he said. 

“I see this as being an aid in augmenting employees to be able to work at their fullest without burning them out,” Luna said. 

As such, Rita will also be working in the back office, handling insurance pre-authorization claims and appeals, even calling patients to walk them through upcoming procedures and answering common questions about the status of referrals or medication refills. 

She will also be combing through thousands of pages of medical records to help physicians summarize and pinpoint medical milestones to bring up for further discussion during a patient visit. All information collected by the AI agent is stored in a HIPAA-compliant manner, executives said. 

“The fact that she can read so many pages in a fraction of a second, that’s impressive, right? Because when you think about medical records, I just received a stack of them today, to be able to [have AI] synthesize them to allow me to use my human innate ability to deduce what I need to do next, that’s where you get this beautiful synergy,” Luna said. 

Humanate is a startup spun out of Texas A&M and led by Carlos Rodriguez as CEO. 

The company has raised at least $1.6 million from friends and family in the pre-seed round and is expecting to raise funds from investors in its Series A round soon, seeking to raise up to $10 million. 

Often, healthcare providers’ schedules are so jam-packed with patient visits that they complete documentation, like a discharge note after surgery, but the surgeon doesn’t have time to call the patient and offer aftercare. And increasingly, even nurses and medical assistants don’t have time to call patients because their in-person patient load is already at max. So AI agents will contact patients, walk them through medical information provided by professionals, and give them time to answer all questions without rushing them, he said. 

Rodriguez is pitching the AI agent to other healthcare providers in the Valley and sees significant potential for its use in rural health care. 

There’s a $50 billion federal fund for rural healthcare transformation, intended to leverage technology to improve patient care, that could be used in Rio Grande Valley communities like Starr County. 

“I say that AI is not going to replace people, it’s going to augment what people can do,” Rodriguez said. 

For example, if there are 10 patients waiting in line, Rita can check in about 80% of them. 

“Because there’s no extenuating circumstance like hey, I moved, or I lost my card. Those are things she won’t know how to deal with. She’ll take care of those eight patients and send the other two to the humans who deal with difficult cases.”