By Erin Palm, M.D.
It is 9 p.m. on a Tuesday night, and Nikki’s kitchen looks more like a laboratory than a room where food is cooked and prepared. Nikki is starting a round of IVF, and must mix two medications together, collect them in a syringe, and inject them into her abdomen. And she has to do this alone, without the supervision of her doctor.
Nikki’s fertility clinic sent instructional videos for her to watch, but the bottles in the videos look very different from those on her kitchen counter. Nikki is confused, and growing increasingly worried she’s about to do something wrong. She calls her doctor but reaches an answering service, so she goes ahead with the injection, crossing her fingers that she did it correctly.
In the U.S., receiving healthcare depends on information changing hands. And that’s not just for patients undergoing treatments like Nikki. A doctor writing a new prescription, a payor approving a prior authorization, a patient enrolling in a financial assistance program – all of these require the flow of data from one entity to another.
But to date, the communications lines in healthcare are broken.
The cost of broken communication
Today, communication breaks down or simply doesn’t happen across a largely manual or rigidly automated web of processes that demands much of patients but also provider, health plan, and life sciences staff. So much data exists, but it is scattered across systems and formats – and conversations between people have been the primary method of transfer, despite the fact that these people are already spread thin.
At the same time, administrative complexity is increasing, healthcare workforces are shrinking, and patient expectations are growing. The cost of the resulting bottlenecks is measured in historic levels of frustration (like Nikki above), disengagement, millions of lost hours in productivity, and delayed or denied access to therapies across the healthcare system.
The promise of healthcare interoperability via standards and data exchanges has long eluded us. As we turn one corner, it always seems to be around the next one. So what do we do to fill the gap while we wait? We pick up the phone, send a text, write a chat message, hoping to connect with a person on the other end.
Yet traditional communications tools are not sufficient to solve these challenges. And while the emergence of AI has demonstrated extraordinary promise, AI alone isn’t a solution to the interoperability problem. But there is another path forward.
With AI, we can create the connection layer that healthcare requires for better outcomes. And this has created a pivotal moment for both healthcare and AI. Precisely because healthcare is incredibly siloed and hard to navigate, it is the place where this transformative technology is now poised to make its greatest impact. With agentic communications in healthcare, we can finally scale the connections that, up until this point, only people were able to make.
This is not a promise to fix every legacy system in healthcare, but to provide the context and connectivity layer that enables conversations to happen seamlessly and correctly – any time, anywhere, free of the constraints that have so far been holding the industry back.
Agentic communications: AI for regulated, domain specific healthcare workflows
Using Nikki above as an example, what if her medication had come along with a number to call, 24/7, where she could reach an AI agent and share her concerns about the discrepancies between the instructional videos and her medications? What if that same AI agent called her – and every other patient in her shoes – the next day, to follow up and make sure all her concerns were addressed?
And what if healthcare organizations could integrate such a solution seamlessly, “plugging it in” to historically siloed data systems? What if the AI agents it offered could connect with patients, providers, and payors via their preferred channel, wherever they already are? To complete everything from administrative tasks – like verifying benefits or confirming a provider’s address – to clinical ones, like answering medication questions and checking in on symptoms?
The potential is real, and the need is urgent. Across the industry, overworked teams are inundated with time-intensive tasks that delay care, and fragmented workflows that impact treatment; clinicians are suffering from burnout in record numbers, health plans and pharmaceutical patient support call centers are overwhelmed; patients like Nikki are left without answers.
With agentic communications, we can fill these gaps, extending the reach of healthcare staff and allowing them to focus on tasks that require a human touch, reducing strain on staff and ensuring patients receive access and support when they need it most. And most critically, they are built with safety and security at their core, explicitly engineered for compliance, control, and trust at every step.
Healthcare’s transformative moment has arrived
Although prior generations of tech have failed to transform healthcare – or perhaps because of that failure – healthcare is now at the forefront of agent development. We don’t have it all solved yet, but in striving to meet this industry’s deeply human demands, leaders at the intersection of healthcare and agentic AI will be pushing the whole field forward.
But those healthcare leaders need confidence their agentic systems will adapt to new therapies, shifting patient populations, and evolving regulations. For that, they don’t just need a platform vendor promising generic agents; they need a partner that understands the regulatory, technical, and human realities of agentic communications in healthcare. We’ve built Infinitus to be that partner.
With proven technology, deep domain expertise, and a commitment to trust, compliance, and safety, we’re the leading agentic communications partner and are helping healthcare organizations adopt such tools today.
If you’d like to learn more about agentic communications, and the potential for your, organization, visit infinitus.ai or contact our team directly.