In the last post, we discussed the improving capabilities of generative AI and its increasing ability to reason through complex problems. This is the evolution that will be critical if AI systems will become fully autonomous in the near future and free up human resources to focus on different activities. Like any other technology, AI agents will be better-suited for certain activities. In healthcare, the initial use cases that come to mind involved administrative tasks such as note-taking, reimbursement coding, prior authorization, claims processing, placing referral orders, patient communication and more. In other industries, similar types of use cases are the initial applications of agents. In an article by Bessemer Venture Partners, they list a number of applications that AI agents are being used in across sectors, including healthcare:
Software sales: Relevance AI’s sales development representative (SDR) agent, Bosh, automates the process of identifying, researching, and contacting leads, and scheduling meetings.
Recruiting: LinkedIn recently announced the launch of its first AI agent Hiring Assistant, which takes on certain workflows typically done by recruiters, including sourcing candidates, turning notes into drafts of job descriptions, and more.
Customer support: Slang’s voice AI fields phone calls for restaurants, answering simple questions, making reservations, and connecting customers to employees as needed. Similarly, Assort Health’s AI agent call center for healthcare schedules patients appointments, reducing wait times and dropped calls.
Back office functions: Tennr automates document and referral processing, data entry, and other manual workflows related to healthcare administration.
In a recent McKinsey article, there’s discussion of how AI can reshape the consumer experience in healthcare. While other sectors of the economy such as transportation, hospitality, and telecom have benefited from digital transformation of the customer journey, this has not been the case in healthcare. Consumers in healthcare, AKA patients, face long wait times, difficulty navigating their care, and little transparency during the process. Much of this is due to a severe shortage of resources, including doctors, nurses, and more. AI agents can start doing some of this heavy lifting and augment the overburdened healthcare staff in doing their jobs. This can provide relief to both providers and patients. The authors discuss the key areas in which AI can augment the consumer journey. These areas include:
- Personalized recommendations for individuals for wellness and healthy lifestyle choices. Gen AI can tailor wellness programs and personalize messages with the aim of increasing the likelihood of engagement. The AI agent can act as a health coach that processes patient data and based on its training on medical literature it can provide recommendations directly to the individual
- Making care easier to find and navigate. AI can serve as a digital front door to start the care journey and then orchestrate the next steps in the process at each step. To make all of this possible, the AI agent will need to be connected to patient data and the different systems in a health system so it can collect the information it needs and do reasoning to figure out the next steps.
- Making the insurance journey easier. AI agents can help patients understand their coverage for different medical procedures and provide that information in an easy to understand format based on the patient’s data, including language, reading level, and so on.
- Improve quality of care. AI agents based on ambient listening can facilitate better doctor – patient encounter by automatically generating the note for the doctor so they don’t have to be looking at their computer during the entire visit!! or, it can monitor the patient in a hospital room and alert the nurse when the patient is in distress or needs assistance. This can free up the nurses from having to constantly check on each patient.
- Improving patient adherence to their medical program. Patients often have poor understanding of their medical problems or instructions given to them by their problems. AI agent can use the patient data and their preferences to provide easy-to-understand instructions that’s free of medical jargon and is accessible at all times.
All of this shows that AI agents can finally usher in a new era where healthcare is more accessible, easier to navigate, and higher quality. Of course, while AI agents are starting to show some promise, they are work-in-progress and their utility has not yet been fully established. As such, before we render the final verdict on how impactful they will be, we should examine their current capabilities for reasoning and acting independently. We will do that in the next post.
