The future of healthcare: Agents for change

In a 2023 survey, 45% of customer care leaders identified adopting the latest tech, including AI, as a top priority—up 17% points from 2021. What’s driving this adoption of cutting-edge technology in healthcare?

Healthcare spending in the United States (U.S.) totaled a whopping $4.5 trillion annually in 2022, and a quarter of that amount was spent on administrative expenses. Clinicians spend about 16 minutes per patient on electronic medical records. This shows that there are big problems with balancing patient care and paperwork.

But here's the good news: innovative ways of using AI, like agentic automation, can increase efficiency in both internal and customer-facing functions across insurers, care providers, and government healthcare organizations. So, what is agentic automation and how can it transform your healthcare organization? Read on to find out.

What value can agents bring to healthcare?

Agentic systems operate autonomously, make decisions, and act within an environment to achieve goals. Agentic automation gives agents the power to plan, work, and make decisions with minimal human oversight. Agents are the combination of AI, automation, and orchestration. They are designed to perform tasks that were considered too complex to automate through traditional means, such as robotic process automation (RPA), API, etc.

Agentic automation can vastly improve prior authorization processes by autonomously evaluating resource utilization, eligibility criteria, and required documentation. We can identify potential bottlenecks in real time, shortening the review process by 40% while providing transparency for both payers and providers.

How agents can help in healthcare

Agentic automation involves various categories of AI agents designed to perform specific functions autonomously. The key ones are listed below.

• Agents that are designed to provide context-based information to users based on their queries. In healthcare, they can be used to summarize coordination of benefits or answer specific plan-related questions for members. Another example could be an agent that provides guidance on necessary medication dosing and administration protocols, adhering to U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) guidelines and hospital policies.

• Agents that can create and run workflows across applications, find the right application programming interfaces (APIs), plan the best ways to do things, and meet user requests. For example, a goal-based agent could provide a summary of medical records to give nurses the gist of a patient’s documentation and help them arrive at a decision. Another example could be in diagnostic support. Agents can analyze medical images and comb through patient data to provide critical inputs to clinicians and significantly improve disease detection accuracy. For example, at Emory Healthcare, clinical algorithms powered by AI analyze CT scans for signs of pulmonary embolism and provide real-time alerts about patients, eliminating the need for manual searches.

• Agents that can streamline end-to-end processes by assuming a virtual coworker role and executing actions autonomously. A risk management agent, for example, could analyze patient population data to identify individuals at high risk of readmission based on key patterns or developing chronic conditions.

Advantages of AI agents in healthcare

Enhance patient care

Agents acting as virtual health assistants can provide 24/7 support, real-time monitoring, personalized treatment recommendations, and medication reminders, improving health outcomes by identifying issues early and boosting patient satisfaction.

Streamline healthcare operations

Automating appointment scheduling, administrative tasks, claims processing, and resource optimization helps reduce errors, cut wait times, and improve efficiency.

Improve diagnosis and treatment

Agents can enhance diagnostic accuracy, assist in drug discovery, develop personalized care plans, and support telemedicine for remote monitoring and timely interventions.

Operational benefits

Agents can also reduce costs, decrease staff workload, ensure quality assurance, and continuously improve processes by learning over time.

A new wave of productivity and innovation

Generative AI and specialized AI have infused new life into robots, so they’re able to handle increasingly complex processes, including structured and unstructured documents. And now, with the introduction of agentic capabilities, a new wave of productivity and innovation for enterprises will be unlocked.

UiPath Autopilot™ for Everyone is an AI companion that personalizes assistance, helping every employee automate their daily tasks. We are also introducing UiPath Agent Builder, a brand-new interface to design and evaluate agents from the ground up. Agent Builder provides a guided experience for automation developers and business users to build, evaluate, and publish agents.

What about security and governance? How do we ensure personally identifiable information (PII) and protected health information (PHI) data are not exposed to third parties?

What about data residency? How do we know model predictions are reliable, accurate, and consistent?

Creating responsible AI involves protecting our customers’ data and complying with new and emerging privacy and security regulations. The UiPath AI Trust Layer is a management framework designed to ensure that GenAI-powered solutions adhere to customers' data and personnel policies. It enables organizations to manage the use of GenAI within the UiPath Platform™ responsibly.

Embracing the agentic future

The integration of agentic AI systems into the healthcare industry holds immense potential to address current workforce challenges and enhance patient care. By automating administrative tasks, AI agents (along with robots) can alleviate the burden on healthcare professionals, allowing them to focus on caring for patients. The adoption of agentic solutions can also streamline healthcare operations, improve diagnostic accuracy, and support the development of personalized treatment plans.

As we move forward, it is crucial to ensure that these technological advancements are implemented responsibly, with a strong emphasis on data privacy and security.

Embracing these innovations will allow the healthcare industry to achieve greater efficiency, reduce costs, and ultimately provide better care for patients. The future of healthcare is bright, with AI agents playing a pivotal role in driving positive change and transforming the way healthcare services are delivered.