Definition
The TCPA (Telephone Consumer Protection Act) is the 1991 U.S. federal law that restricts calls and texts placed with an autodialer or an artificial or prerecorded voice, sets consent requirements for those calls, and created the national framework for Do Not Call rules.
The TCPA is enforced by the FCC and, unusually, by private plaintiffs. Its statutory damages are $500 per violation, trebled to up to $1,500 when a violation is willful or knowing, and every call or text counts separately. That per-call arithmetic is why TCPA suits are so often filed as class actions: in the first half of 2025, plaintiffs filed 1,052 TCPA class actions, against 539 in the same stretch of 2024.
For patient outreach, the most consequential development is the FCC's February 2024 declaratory ruling that AI-generated voices are "artificial" voices under the TCPA. An AI voice agent calling patients therefore sits inside the robocall rules, with the same consent, identification, and opt-out obligations as a prerecorded message. Healthcare is not automatically exempt: the FCC's healthcare exemption is narrow, and recent settlements such as Fried v. Kaiser ($10.5M, texts after "stop") and Patterson v. OptumRx ($1.86M, adherence calls to wrong numbers) show healthcare organizations are now defendants.
The rules are also moving. The FCC tightened consent revocation in 2025, while in February 2026 the Fifth Circuit held in Bradford v. Sovereign Pest Control that the statute's text does not require written consent for marketing calls. Programs calling at scale have to track both directions of change.
How Consig handles it
Consig's compliance engine monitors changing regulations and automatically enforces the relevant federal and state calling rules, including TCPA, on each call. The portal flags risky steps while a workflow is being built.