Rehumanizing global health care with agentic AI

The global health care sector is under increasing strain. Decades of chronic underinvestment and constraints in recruitment have coincided with a surge in demand for services for aging populations. Gaps in provision are already taking a toll, with fragmented access to care and high rates of stress and burnout among staff. And it’s getting worse. The World Health Organization has warned that current shortfalls will increase to 11 million workers by 2030. In their urgent hunt for a solution, many health-care providers are now pinning their hopes on agentic AI, with more than two-thirds (68%) having already adopted AI agents into their workforce, according to KPMG. The technology is being deployed to automate complex back-office processes, collaborate with medical teams, and even triage patients, all in a bid to reduce the cognitive load on clinicians and improve quality of care for patients as the supply of human health-care workers dwindles. A different type of digitalization Until now, the benefits of digitalization within health care have been limited. Many staff have blamed slow or outdated technology for adding to the administrative burden rather than alleviating it. For example, U.S. patient data was migrated to electronic health records (EHRs) in the early 2000s, but this data remains fragmented and reliant on manual inputs. New telehealth services and digital care tools, like remote monitors, have had similar shortcomings, says Ashis Barad, MD, chief digital and technology officer at Hospital for Special Surgery (HSS), an academic medical center in New York that focuses on musculoskeletal health. Both technologies have helped improve access to health care by removing geographical barriers, he says, but they’ve failed to replicate the quality of in-person care or win trust from patients. Agentic AI is different from these existing technologies, he insists. Rather than relying on manual inputs or defaulting to human workers for any case that sits slightly outsid