Rehumanizing global health care with agentic AI (www.technologyreview.com)

The health care sector is increasingly leveraging agentic AI to address significant workforce shortages, exacerbated by high demand and chronic underinvestment. With the World Health Organization estimating a need for 11 million extra health care workers by 2030, over two-thirds of providers have integrated AI agents to automate complex backend processes and enhance clinician-patient interactions. Agentic AI's capability to handle nuanced, complex scenarios sets it apart from earlier digital health technologies, which often added to clinicians' administrative burdens rather than alleviating them. Key implementations, such as the AI scheduling and triage service developed by Ema Unlimited at the Hospital for Special Surgery, streamline patient access to care by utilizing conversational AI to assess conditions and book appointments, drastically improving operational efficiencies. For instance, the handling of insurance claims has seen a remarkable reduction in processing time from weeks to mere days, achieving a 100% success rate on appeals. The future vision for AI in health care envisages automating up to 90% of non-clinical tasks, enabling clinicians to focus more on personalized patient care. As health care providers become more comfortable integrating AI into complex decision-making processes, this technology promises to enhance the quality of care while rehumanizing the patient experience.