AI agents can lighten the burden on swamped healthcare professionals

The spotlight in healthcare AI is shifting dramatically. While AI scribes have dominated the narrative for the past few years, touted as the “silver bullet” for the clinical documentation burden and deeply integrated into electronic medical records, a new, more profound trend is emerging: agentic AI.

These scribe technologies, rapidly evolving into commodities regardless of vendor, now compete primarily on price and ease of integration. With low switching costs, more entrants and further price differentiation will undoubtedly occur over the coming years until market consolidation takes hold.

Yet, the broader landscape of administrative burden has already been revolutionized by readily available GPT solutions like ChatGPT, Co-Pilot, Gemini, and Claude. These tools are not only hype; they’re delivering tangible results, with some claiming to reduce administrative time by 6-12 hours weekly.

As a healthcare executive and technology professional, I can personally attest to the reality of these figures; I’ve achieved a 40 percent increase in productivity with these tools and now consider them indispensable.

The next few years will undoubtedly be dominated by AI agents, or “agentic AI,” as the industry has termed them. These impartial agents, capable of exhibiting empathy and kindness, offer tireless support – working without time limits, vacations, or sick days.

Such resources can profoundly impact healthcare by closing care gaps, performing thousands of outreach calls, improving medication compliance, decreasing no-shows, and ultimately enhancing outcomes for both high-risk patients and familiar faces.

Our healthcare systems desperately need this infusion of AI-powered helpers, schedulers, extenders, augmenters, and assistants.

That raises important questions: Can these technologies provide an answer to our human healthcare resource crisis? Can they reduce admissions and alleviate congestion in high-cost care settings? Bolster chronic disease management? Could they even be deployed during emergency responses to mitigate the negative impacts of floods, fires, and extreme heat?

The potential use cases are limitless, and the application of these models could be vast and impactful. The question is no longer “Can they work?” but “Are we ready?”

For me, that readiness came into sharp focus in August 2023. Listening to an AI agent perform an outreach call was a seismic moment, fundamentally shifting my perspective and allaying my skepticism.

For weeks, I was consumed by thoughts of the myriad use cases and wicked problems this technology could address. Obvious questions quickly followed: What would be the engagement and completion rates? Could we integrate additional interaction modalities to boost adoption? How do we build trust? And the overarching concern: How do we safely deploy these digital experiences?

In healthcare, this necessitates crucial requirements: defining guardrails, safety engines, empathy constructs, cultural intelligence and impartiality to ensure equity in every interaction.

We need clear, warm handoffs, escalation pathways, and robust supervision models – both human and machine – along with understanding how the system would learn and evolve.

Intake AI agents capture patient histories by automating intake, surveys and follow-ups releasing time to care for clinicians. The AI tailors the interactions depending on the patient’s comorbidities, creating a personalized experience.

Embedded with therapeutic techniques to handle even the toughest conversations and trained on millions of recorded communications, these solutions do not aim to replace irreplaceable humans. Instead, they offer a vital expansion of services, providing interactions and support that are simply beyond our current capacity.

The signs are clear: the future of healthcare support includes empathetic, intelligent agents working alongside us.

Elewana Advisory stands ready to empower your efforts in digitally transforming the healthcare experience through Agentic AI. Contact us at ElewanaAdvisory.com to accelerate your transformation.

Jennifer MacGregor is managing director and founder, Elewana Advisory.