Agentic artificial intelligence is reshaping the way some healthcare organizations coordinate care, streamline patient journeys and expand access to essential services.
It’s not just a passive tool; it supports information analysis and orchestrate complex workflows in clinical and administrative environments, notably by improving screening pathways and facilitating care transitions.
“By stabilizing IT infrastructure, agentic AI helps lay the foundation for greater advanced front-end automation” says Mutaz Shegewi, senior research director for AI, platforms and global healthcare provider technologies at IDC.
Capacity optimizers, which help hospitals deal with unpredictable patient volumes and staffing constraints, are another area gaining traction, he adds. “They are particularly useful in emergency departments, where delays are costly,” says Shegewi.
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Color Health uses agentic AI to improve access to screenings
Color Healthspecialized in providing cancer care, recently partnered with Google to leverage agentic AI to make breast cancer screening more accessible with the Color Assistant agent. It automates the first steps of breast cancer risk assessment and screening for women aged 40 and older, as well as those considered to be at higher risk according to clinical guidelines.
“In healthcare, the average case is simple, but some cases can be very complicated,” says Othman Laraki, CEO of Color Health.
This long list of risk factors – family history, childhood cancers, genetic mutations, environmental exposures or symptoms – creates branching logic so cumbersome that programming it into standard web forms becomes impractical.
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Through an online portal, the system gathers eligibility information, answers user questions and routes cases to a Color Medical National Medical Group clinician for review.
Care teams then follow up with eligible patients to clarify details, schedule mammograms, or order additional images (such as ultrasounds or MRIs) as appropriate.
“The agent model, by integrating a layer of reasoning into the process, allows you to create workflows that can encapsulate this complexity,” explains Laraki.
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Hackensack Meridian Health Do AI agents support clinicians
As a traditional supplier based in New Jersey, Hackensack Meridian Health deploys agentic AI to automate tasks that clinicians do not have the time or capacity to handle consistently.
The organization targets unmet needs and expands its capabilities through what Sameer Sethi, senior vice president and chief AI officer, calls “automation plus.”
A major application is monitoring patients after discharge, where rapid awareness can prevent avoidable readmissions. The AI agent, named Erin, checks how patients are feeling, whether they have scheduled follow-up appointments, whether they are taking medications, and whether they need to speak to someone immediately.
44%
The percentage of healthcare respondents who say they use agentic AI to improve the patient experience.
Source: cloud.google.com, “Strong Vital Signs: Healthcare and Life Sciences Ready for AI Innovation,” October 16, 2025
“If that’s the case, the conversation is diverted to a human,” says Sethi.
The system transcribes and summarizes the interaction, flags concerns, and ensures a clinician reviews each case.
A second agent focuses on the complaints appeal processwhich is historically a labor-intensive task for nurses. The officer reads the denial letters, determines what is missing, gathers the corrected documentation and sends it to a nurse for approval.
“We are now handling more calls,” says Sethi. “Our entire appeals process sometimes took 15 to 16 days. Now we do it in one or two days.”
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