Healthcare's Agentic AI Evolution: A New Way Forward in Patient Care
With today’s complex healthcare system, patients managing chronic health conditions can often feel like they’re taking on a second job. They often are in a position of needing to juggle specialist appointments, prescription refills, insurance approvals, and follow-up care, all while trying to maintain their daily lives. But the patient healthcare experience is on the cusp of a transformation.
With advancements in AI orchestration capabilities, virtual care concierges will have the potential to ease patient efforts by managing these complex healthcare journeys, working behind the scenes to schedule appointments, submit and see insurance pre-authorizations through to completion, manage prescription refill orders, and provide personalized care reminders.
These virtual concierges will have the potential to significantly improve the coordination of care, drastically reducing a patient’s need to be hands-on so they can spend more time where they need to: focusing on their wellness. They could even proactively identify potential healthcare concerns based on patterns and data insights that may have remained undiscovered by the human eye, alerting their healthcare providers to possible concerns so they may navigate developments and discuss potential care options with their patients.
While AI technology is evolving rapidly in healthcare environments, it can be challenging for patients to envision this level of autonomy when today's chatbots often leave them frustrated and without answers to the most basic questions about their care. However, while current bots aren't always meeting expectations, they've laid the initial groundwork for more effective and empathetic patient experiences.
Healthcare chatbots move beyond basic support
Today, most healthcare bots respond to patient queries with pre-programmed responses designed by humans. As a result, they are often most useful for simple tasks like scheduling appointments, providing medication pickup reminders, or surfacing generic FAQs for basic health questions.
With the arrival of generative AI and emerging agentic AI capabilities—which can independently pursue goals and take actions on behalf of users—the next generation of healthcare bots represents a fundamental shift in capabilities. These virtual agents can provide enhanced assistance between patient and provider for more complicated tasks, including initial symptom assessment, medication interactions, and comprehensive care coordination, which can make healthcare practitioners even more effective. As these AI agents become more autonomous and better at understanding human needs over time, we believe patient perception of AI in healthcare environments will likely trend more positively as they become effective partners in ensuring the delivery of quality care.
Equipped to coordinate on patients' behalf, these advanced virtual agents will be empowered to optimize the delivery of care in the future. With these advanced agentic AI capabilities, we see a future in which patients will no longer face long wait times or struggle with passive bots that can't help them coordinate the appropriate care.
A critical component
For agentic AI to truly transform patient care, it must integrate deeply with electronic health records (EHRs), which serve as the central repository of a patient’s medical history, diagnoses, treatments, and care plans. The EHR holds the critical context that will allow AI-driven virtual concierges to provide truly personalized guidance, helping to ensure that recommendations align with the patient’s unique health status and treatment journey. By leveraging this wealth of data, agentic AI will be positioned to proactively surface relevant insights, coordinate care based on real-time clinical information, and empower patients with timely, actionable support—bringing their health record to life in ways that drive better engagement, adherence, and outcomes.
AI concierges transform healthcare support
As agentic AI accelerates healthcare innovation, today’s virtual agents are poised to evolve into personal care concierges that can not only anticipate patient needs but also take proactive steps to connect them with the right healthcare providers at the right time. Additionally, we believe these sophisticated AI assistants will be able to connect symptoms, patterns and other data insights to potentially identify health issues, flagging them to healthcare providers for attention or empowering patients to proactively addressing concerns.
Patients will also be able to trust that their personal healthcare concierge is working asynchronously to help manage the treatment plan agreed upon with their doctors. Consider a patient managing multiple chronic conditions—rather than spending hours managing coordination between different specialists and insurance providers, their virtual concierge handles the entire administration process, ensuring smooth communication between providers and keeping the patient informed of progress and next steps. With virtual concierges able to streamline the coordination of care, human healthcare support staff will be enabled to focus more on the most critical or sensitive patient interactions, while the majority of routine care coordination and support happens seamlessly in the background.
While basic chatbots have already begun to change how healthcare organizations interact with patients, the advancement of agentic AI systems in the future hold the potential to fundamentally transform how patients access care, build relationships with providers, and navigate the increasingly complex healthcare system. Healthcare organizations that effectively implement these new, cutting-edge AI technologies as they become available will be positioned to significantly improve both patient experience and operational efficiency while empowering the delivery of better health outcomes.
Tara Mahoney is vice president of global healthcare industry at the Menlo Park, California-based Genesys.
