How AI Agents for Healthcare Is Transforming Patient Care?
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How AI Agents for Healthcare Can Improve Patient Care?

October 24, 2024
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    In today’s rapidly evolving healthcare landscape, the demand for innovative solutions that improve patient care is more pressing than ever. This is where Agentforce AI agents come into play. The customized agent’s approach addresses the challenges healthcare providers face bit by bit backed by the assistance and trust of Salesforce Health Cloud.

    There’s so much more to it, in this blog we will delve into the world of AI agents for the healthcare sector and learn how they are going to impact the aspects of patient care. 

    So without further ado let’s get started.  

    The Unique Challenges of the Healthcare Sector 

    Like any other sector, the healthcare sector also has a set of unique challenges. Let us discuss those challenges in a brief and try to understand how AI agents can solve these challenges.

    Unique Challenges of the Healthcare Sector Light Img

    Data Overload

    Did you know that almost 30% of the world’s data volume is generated by the healthcare sector alone and that the estimate is about to increase by 6% by 2025 (RBC Capital Markets)? With this amount of data getting churned the overload can overwhelm providers into manually updating the data, making it challenging to extract actionable insights. This data overload can hinder timely decision-making and affect patient care quality. 

    Administrative Issues

    The next big challenge is efficiently carrying out administrative tasks such as recruiting qualified healthcare professionals, managing compliance (HIPPA), or ensuring proper facility management. All these responsibilities are important; however, they distract healthcare professionals from providing personalized patient care. This inefficiency may eventually lead to higher operational costs.

    Ineffective Communication 

    In recent years the conversations around healthcare among the general public have significantly increased. People have become more conscious about their health and sometimes have multiple questions and doubts in their minds that only medical practitioners can solve.

    However, for medical practitioners on the other end of the thread, it becomes overwhelming and challenging to keep up with numerous conversations at once and stay informed about patients’ information. Thus, this can lead to ineffective communication and result in fragmented and poor patient care.

    Patient Monitoring Challenges

    When it comes to patient care, different kinds of patients require particular kinds of care. For instance, a patient dealing with some chronic condition would require more assistance and monitoring from the healthcare providers. The process is quite resource-intensive and sometimes there are even chances that the early signs of deterioration get missed leading to increased healthcare costs. 

    Understanding AI Agents for Healthcare

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    The recently launched Agentforce for Healthcare technology is built on Salesforce’s trust to help healthcare providers create custom AI agents in healthcare all the repetitive tasks like scheduling appointments, managing patient follow-ups, and answering support questions. 

    These agents are designed to augment healthcare providers and can be tailored to meet an organization’s needs. For example, they can summarize a patient’s medical history, prescriptions, and social determinants of health to make them accessible and convenient for doctors. 

    How Do These AI Agents Work in Healthcare?

    Whenever a query is raised intelligent healthcare AI agents process huge amounts of sensitive customer data and give recommendations and responses to users accordingly. The agents can be programmed and guided by a pre-determined set of actions that they need to perform in different scenarios.

    Let us take a closer look at how these agents work considering the unique challenges and requirements of this sector.

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    Step 1: User Request Registration and Interpretation

    • The first and foremost step that an agent does is to register a user’s request for an action to be performed. Certain guardrails and guidelines are set for the agents that help them assist in providing accurate responses to the users.
    • For instance, if a patient inputs, “I need to schedule an appointment with a cardiologist “ then the agent would check for all the permissions and the relevancy of the query and if nothing seemed suspicious then the agent would finally register the query/request and move ahead to process the request.

    Step 2: Gathering Relevant Information

    • The AI agents scan through all the relevant and available data to collect the traces of the required information through their ability of Intelligent Document Processing (IDP). 
    • The agent could refer to sources such as Electronic Health Records (EHRs), and patient’s previous interactions (via phone, text messages, or emails). This data is very vital for the agents to comprehend what the user wants and expects from the outcome. 
    • Advanced AI agents can integrate and process data in real-time, equipping them with the most current information to address patient inquiries and support healthcare professionals effectively.

    Step 3: Making an Informed Decision

    • The next step after collecting all the information is to make an informed decision. AI agents can reason, predict, and respond based on actions pre-set for them to help out human teams.
    • Agents use sophisticated machine-learning models to asses high risks, anomalies, and potential responses to develop personalized medicine recommendations. 
    • For, instance if there is a query from a user that – “based on my medical records suggests to me the names of specialist doctors who are available for the time slot of noon on Saturday.” The agent through the collected data (medical history of the patient) would decide only to suggest the name of doctors who are specialists for the patient’s ailment rapidly. 
    • Plus, would also take suitable actions accordingly such as automating tasks (appointment scheduling and billing). This would ensure that patients receive timely and accurate support, and healthcare professionals can focus on high-value tasks.

    Step 4: Learning and Adapting

    • AI agents in healthcare learn from each interaction, which helps them improve accuracy and effectiveness. They keep up-to-date with the latest guidelines. 
    • Plus, feedback from healthcare professionals also helps them enhance future interactions. This ongoing learning ensures that AI agents stay useful and relevant.

    Benefits of Having AI Agents For Healthcare

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    Here are some of the advantages of utilizing the power of Agentforce for the healthcare sector;

    1. Enhanced Patient Experience

    The overall experience of the patients gets improved and enhanced with the help of AI agents. The healthcare teams can get round-the-clock access to medical information and support. With the help of contextual understanding of the agents, can engage with patients conversationally.

    Making sure that they can get answers to their questions at any time, reducing wait times, and enhancing satisfaction.

    2. Increased Efficiency

    By automating administrative tasks like data entry, billing, and appointment management, AI agents free up valuable time for healthcare providers, enabling them to focus on more important clinical activities.

    This increase in efficiency enhances productivity throughout the organization, allowing providers to dedicate more time to direct patient care.

    3. Cost Benefits

    Having advanced AI agents for healthcare can also reduce the burden of handling multiple administrative tasks manually such as billings, entries, and readmission of patients. This helps the hospitals have cost benefits.

    4. Offers Scalability 

    The AI agents make it easier and more accessible for healthcare professionals to scale their organization by helping them manage vast amounts of patient data, and administrative data, and handle frequent queries. Thus, without compromising on patient care healthcare professionals can upscale.

    How AI Agents Will Help Healthcare – Practitioners And Patients  

    These are some of the use cases of having Agentforce AI agents for the healthcare sector. These are bifurcated and explained from both the perspectives of the caregivers and the patients for better understanding;

    Use Case For Healthcare Practitioners (Doctors)

    • First of all, the agents can help doctors and the medical fraternity by answering the patients’ queries regarding basic instructions and information. This information and instructions could be pre-set by the doctors using guardrails to the extent that they don’t require human assistance for answering. For instance, answering questions like the dates of the lab results or conveying the patients’ appointments promptly, etc.
    • Next up is quickly assisting the medical fraternity with the patient’s medical history (ailments, allergies, treatments, etc.) This will help them analyze all the data throughout and perhaps then make informed decisions accordingly. 
    • Lastly, agents can allow doctors to set reminders for patients in regard to their upcoming medicine refills. This can ensure that the process of providing utmost care to the patients remains intact and uninterrupted. 
    • Furthermore, the healthcare advisors can also have access to the medical insurance policies of the patients, thus they can help them around yeh claim settlements in a much more efficient way. 

      For example, there’s Dr. David who’s a heart specialist in the States. He has deployed AI agents recently, who help him get a much closer view of his patients and give them more personalized care. Dr. David has one of his patients Mr. Smith who had come for a routine check-up. The Dr. can then ask the agent to give him a complete profile view of the patient to check whether he has some past issues or not and thereon suggest the right treatment and medications.

    Use Case For Healthcare Patients (New/ Existing)

    • For new and old patients both agents can help them navigate through the tedious appointment processes. The agents can on their own with their abilities manage the doctor appointments for the patient effortlessly.
    • For instance, there is Mike who wants to check whether he can have a doctor’s appointment on Thursday around 3 p.m. as he is not occupied at this timeslot. The agent will make sure that Mike’s instructions are followed and only those results are shown wherein there is a possibility of appointment scheduling.
      Additionally, some other suggestive alternatives are shown as well. Eventually making it convenient and accessible for Mike.

    Also, apart from managing the appointments the agents can help update the health records and their histories for patients. From information such as contact details or medical history patients can self sufficiently with the help of AI agents take charge of their records.

    Build Your Own Custom AI Agent with the Help of Cyntexa Light CTA

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    Summary: 

    AgentForce AI agents can change healthcare for the better. They can improve patient outcomes, enhance the patient experience, and make operations more efficient. By understanding how AI agents work in healthcare, healthcare providers, practitioners, and patients can team up to build a better and more sustainable healthcare system.

    Frequently Asked Questions

    AI agents can revolutionize healthcare by automating tasks, analyzing data for insights, and even assisting in diagnoses.

    Agentforce in Healthcare can provide real-time data analysis and recommendations, aiding healthcare providers in making informed decisions.

    AI agents can address challenges such as administrative burdens, diagnostic errors, and resource allocation inefficiencies.

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