It Felt Like Getting a Hug: What Happens When AI Sees the Emotional Labor of Care Management

Care managers work alone.

Not physically alone, necessarily — but functionally, emotionally alone in a way that's easy to overlook. They spend their days on calls with people in crisis: members managing chronic illness, navigating a health system that's hard to understand, sometimes grieving, sometimes frightened, sometimes just exhausted. The care manager holds space for all of it, call after call, usually from a home office, with no one watching and no one to debrief with between calls.

Then the call ends. They document. The next call starts.

There's no colleague to turn to and say: that was a hard one. No supervisor who heard the conversation. No one who knows what just happened.

This is the invisible labor at the center of care management. And it's the thing most healthcare AI doesn't even try to address.

What the feedback feature is

After every call, care managers using Laguna can open a feedback drawer — a brief, personalized assessment of how the conversation went. Not a performance review. Not a score. Something closer to what a thoughtful colleague would say if they'd been listening alongside you.

It might acknowledge that the call was difficult and that they handled it with patience. It might note a moment of genuine connection with the member. It might gently suggest that next time, when a member expresses fear, reflecting that feeling back before moving to the next question could deepen the relationship.

It sees the call. It sees them.

What people actually say about it

We didn't expect this feature to land the way it did.

One care manager described it simply: "I felt like I was getting a hug."

Others have been similarly direct:

"It's so encouraging — it's like getting a gold star. It can absolutely reinvigorate me after a tough member interaction."

"It'll keep me going. That'll help stave off the burnout!"

"My confidence and quality of calls has improved so much using Laguna. If they were to listen to calls prior to this and a call using Laguna, there's a huge difference."

One person said she loves arguing with it — when it tells her she could have shown more empathy in a particular moment, she thinks about whether it's right. Sometimes she agrees. Sometimes she pushes back. Either way, she's reflecting on her practice in a way she wasn't before.

A supervisor, initially nervous about how her team would respond to being evaluated, said afterward: "They seem to really like it. It's provided in a non-punitive way." Another said: "This system picks up everything. It's so amazing. It makes me want to go back to care coordination."

The number that surprised us

More than 80% of care managers open the feedback drawer after every call.

This is a voluntary feature. No one is required to look at it. There's no administrative consequence for skipping it. And yet the vast majority of coaches, consistently, choose to open it.

That's not the behavior of people tolerating a tool. That's the behavior of people who find something meaningful there — who want to know what it saw.

Why this matters beyond the individual

Care manager burnout is one of the most expensive and least-discussed problems in health plan operations. Turnover is high. Training is expensive. Experienced coaches carry institutional knowledge that walks out the door when they leave.

The causes of burnout in this role are well-documented: emotional exhaustion from high-acuity member interactions, isolation from working remotely, lack of feedback and professional development, and the feeling that difficult, skilled work goes unseen.

The feedback drawer doesn't solve all of that. But it addresses something specific and real: the moment right after a hard call, when a care manager is sitting alone and processing what just happened, with no one to tell them they did well.

In that moment, a thoughtful, accurate, personally-relevant note — one that names what was hard, acknowledges what they did right, and offers one concrete thing to consider — lands differently than it would in any other context. It fills a gap that no supervisor, no matter how attentive, could consistently fill across dozens of coaches and hundreds of calls per week.

Why we built it

The simplest answer: we believed that the people doing this work deserved to have it witnessed.

Care managers are skilled clinicians navigating some of the most emotionally complex conversations in healthcare. The fact that those conversations happen on the phone, at home, without an audience, doesn't make them less important — or less demanding. It just makes the feedback loop disappear.

AI is well-positioned to close that loop. Not because it's warmer than a human supervisor, but because it's there — for every call, every coach, every moment. It has no favorites. It doesn't give feedback only when it has time. It doesn't miss the calls that happen at 4:30 on a Friday.

The question we started with wasn't can we build a feedback feature? It was: what would it feel like to have someone in your corner, every single call, who actually paid attention?

Apparently, it feels like a hug.