WASHINGTON, DC — Congressman August Pfluger (TX-11), a member of the U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee, participated in an Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee hearing titled "Stopping Illegal Robocalls and Robotexts: Progress, Challenges, and Next Steps."

During the hearing, Rep. Pfluger emphasized that while this is certainly an issue for everyone who receives robocalls and robotexts, it is especially alarming for physicians who are being interrupted by these illegal calls and texts while caring for their patients. To highlight this, Rep. Plfuger showed screenshots from physicians in TX-11, receiving back-to-back illegal robocalls.

Rep. Pfluger then questioned the witnesses on how Congress can effectively assist in stopping illegal robocalls and robotexts, especially when it comes to physicians in hospitals receiving these calls that disrupt patient care.

Watch the full interaction HERE or read highlights below.

Rep. Pfluger: What do you think we can do? And anybody is open to answering this. What do you think we can do for hospitals in general? You know, for those that are providing emergency services? Because nobody's using a pager anymore, it's all cell phones, and maybe they need to go back to that. But what can we do to think creatively to really stop that? Every constituent of mine wants it stopped, but are there specific ideas?

Sarah Leggin: That's a good question. You know, it's a really challenging issue, especially when we want to make sure that critical public safety and public health services need to get their calls through. The same tools that we apply to protect consumers can protect the personal lines of physicians and other things: call blocking, call labeling, call filtering services, and then combining that with enforcement so that we're stopping those at the source.

Rep. Pfluger: This particular physician goes through, deletes, reports junk, and does all of that, so it sounds like it's been a continued issue. I'll go to Mr. Bercu. When we look at the gaps, and just kind of building on this same theme, are there specific things that you would have us do to address those gaps? And if so, maybe describe how they affect, let's just go with the physician sector, the health industry?

Joshua Bercu: Yeah, absolutely. I think we have the right framework. Mr. Winters was talking about the robocall mitigation database, and I couldn't agree more. We need to find ways to quickly find the bad actors in that database and get them out. The FCC does require that providers have to do due diligence about who they take traffic from, so we're developing the data to see who keeps taking traffic from these shell companies. So I'm optimistic we'll continue to make progress. There are, as Ms. Leggin mentioned, blocking labeling in specific use cases. I know we work sometimes with some companies that sit on the inbound call side for a hospital, and they have sophisticated tools to see which is the consumer, which is not. So those are some of the things I'd recommend that the doctor look into.