Agentic artificial intelligence is reshaping how some healthcare organizations coordinate care, streamline patient journeys and expand access to critical services.
It’s not just a passive tool; it’s supporting information analysis and orchestrating complex workflows across clinical and administrative environments, including improving screening pathways and easing care transitions.
“By stabilizing IT infrastructure, agentic AI helps lay the foundation for more advanced, front-end automation,” says Mutaz Shegewi, senior research director for worldwide healthcare provider AI, platforms and technologies at IDC.
Capacity optimization agents, which help hospitals deal with unpredictable patient volumes and staffing constraints, are another area gaining traction, he adds. “They're especially helpful in emergency departments, where delays are costly,” Shegewi says.
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Color Health Uses Agentic AI to Improve Access to Screenings
Color Health, which specializes 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 age 40 and older, as well as those considered at a higher risk under clinical guidelines.
“In healthcare, the average case is simple, but some cases can be very complicated,” says Color Health CEO Othman Laraki.
This long list of risk factors — family history, childhood cancers, genetic mutations, environmental exposures or symptoms — creates branching logic so unwieldy 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 clinician in Color Medical’s nationwide medical group for review.
Care teams then follow up with eligible patients to clarify details, schedule mammograms or order additional imaging (such as ultrasounds or MRIs) when appropriate.
“The agentic model, by having a reasoning layer in the process, enables you to build these workflows that can encapsulate that complexity,” Laraki says.
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Hackensack Meridian Health Has AI Agents Support Clinicians
As a traditional provider based in New Jersey, Hackensack Meridian Health is deploying agentic AI to automate tasks that clinicians don’t have the time or capacity to manage consistently.
The organization is targeting unmet needs and expanding capacity through what Sameer Sethi, senior vice president and chief AI officer, calls “automation plus.”
One major application is post-discharge patient follow-up, where timely outreach 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 if they need to speak with someone immediately.
44%
The percentage of healthcare respondents who say they’re using agentic AI to support the patient experience
Source: cloud.google.com, “Strong vital signs: Healthcare and life sciences ready for AI innovation,” Oct. 16, 2025
“If that’s the case, the conversation gets diverted to a human,” Sethi says.
The system transcribes and summarizes the interaction, flags concerns and ensures a clinician reviews each case.
A second agent focuses on the claims appeals process, which is historically a labor-intensive task for nurses. The agent reads denial letters, determines what is missing, assembles corrected documentation and sends it to a nurse for approval.
“We are now processing more appeals,” Sethi says. “Our whole appeals process sometimes took 15 to 16 days. Now, we do it in one or two days.”
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