Rehumanizing global health care with agentic AI The global health care sector is facing severe strain due to underinvestment and increasing demand, leading to worker shortages. Agentic AI is being adopted to automate back-office processes, assist medical teams, and triage patients, aiming to reduce clinician workload and improve care quality. This technology differs from previous digital tools by handling complex scenarios autonomously and iterating over time, transforming workflows and enhancing efficiency.

• Healthcare faces a global strain due to underinvestment and an aging population, leading to an estimated 11 million worker shortage by 2030.
• Agentic AI is being adopted by over two-thirds of healthcare providers to automate administrative tasks, support medical teams, and triage patients.
• Unlike previous digital tools, agentic AI can handle nuanced decisions, retrieve information from expert sources, and iterate, freeing clinicians for higher-level patient care.
• Hospital for Special Surgery (HSS) has successfully deployed AI agents for insurance claims, reducing processing time and improving appeal success rates.
• HSS is implementing an AI scheduling and triage service to streamline patient access to care, factoring in location, insurance, and physician availability.
• Safeguards like human escalation for complex cases and auditable decisions are built into AI agent systems to ensure patient safety.
• The integration of AI agents requires a unified data strategy to overcome fragmentation and create a comprehensive source of truth.
• Agentic AI is viewed as a general-purpose technology that can automate up to 90% of non-clinical tasks, allowing clinicians to focus on specialized and sensitive cases. Continue reading https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/06/02/1137827/rehumanizing-global-health-care-with-agentic-ai