How agentic orchestration can help solve health care's workforce challenge

As healthcare organisations look to address workforce shortages and improve access to care, adding more standalone technologies or AI point solutions won’t be enough. They must rethink how patient experiences are delivered altogether.

Healthcare systems around the world are facing extraordinary pressure. Demand for care continues to grow, workforces are stretched, patient expectations are rising and patient journeys are becoming increasingly complex. Yet despite years of digital transformation, too many patient experiences still feel disconnected.

Patients often navigate multiple phone calls, fragmented digital channels and siloed departments before receiving the care they need. They repeat information, wait for updates and struggle to understand what comes next. At the same time, employees spend countless hours moving between electronic health records (EHRs), scheduling systems, referral platforms and knowledge bases to coordinate care.

These aren’t simply technology problems. They’re experience challenges.

Health care needs orchestration, not more technology

Health care has spent years digitising care, but adding more technology doesn’t create connected experiences. Most organisations have invested in electronic health records, patient portals, scheduling platforms and contact centre technologies. Each delivers value individually, but they’re often deployed to solve specific operational problems rather than working together as a coordinated whole.

The result is a broken experience for both patients and employees.

Take a specialist referral. Behind what should be a relatively straightforward interaction sits a significant amount of manual coordination. Staff often move between scheduling systems, referral platforms, EHRs, knowledge bases and communication tools to progress a patient’s care. Every hand-off introduces unnecessary complexity, delays and duplicate work.

Experience orchestration addresses this challenge by connecting people, systems, data and AI across the patient journey. Rather than treating each interaction as an isolated event, every engagement becomes part of a connected experience where information, context and next steps move seamlessly across departments and technologies.

Looking ahead, a hospital or health system may have hundreds of specialised AI agents operating behind the scenes. One could coordinate referrals, another may manage appointment scheduling, another monitors follow-up communications while others help verify insurance, prepare discharge instructions or keep patients informed throughout their care journey. Rather than operating as isolated tools, these agents will work together as a coordinated ecosystem and engage employees only when human expertise is required.

For patients, this means fewer hand-offs, less repetition and faster access to care. For healthcare employees, it means spending less time navigating administrative processes and more time focused on delivering exceptional patient care.

This won’t be a new generation of chatbots. It’s the evolution of experience orchestration into agentic orchestration.

How agentic AI can coordinate access to care

Much of today’s generative AI helps answer questions or guide patients to an employee for a resolution. Agentic capabilities powered by large action models (LAMs) extend that value by coordinating work across multiple systems to execute business outcomes.

Imagine a patient needing to reschedule a specialist appointment. Rather than directing the patient to another department or simply listing available appointment times, an agentic AI agent will understand the request, verify the patient’s identity, review referral requirements, check availability across appropriate providers, book the appointment, update the necessary systems and confirm the new schedule.

If the request requires additional approvals or clinical judgment, the interaction is seamlessly transferred to the appropriate employee with all the context preserved. The patient doesn’t have to start over, and the employee immediately understands what has already happened and what still needs to happen.

The important distinction is that the AI isn’t making clinical decisions. It’s orchestrating administrative work across existing systems within predefined organisational guardrails. That reduces manual effort, improves continuity and allows clinicians and care teams to spend more time where their expertise matters most in caring for patients.

Trust enables transformation

Health care has always approached innovation thoughtfully, and agentic capabilities should be no exception. As AI becomes capable of coordinating complex workflows, governance is paramount. In Australia, that means working within existing privacy obligations and, where appropriate, regulatory oversight through the Therapeutic Goods Administration.

That’s why many healthcare organisations are choosing to begin their AI journey in operational rather than clinical workflows. Administrative processes such as appointment scheduling, referrals, registration and follow-up consume significant time. They’re also some of the first experiences patients have with the health system. 

Agentic capabilities must operate within trusted systems of record and clearly defined organisational guardrails. They should draw information from approved patient records, scheduling systems, organisational policies and clinical protocols so every action is transparent, compliant and aligned with established processes.

When a request requires clinical expertise or falls outside those guardrails, responsibility should immediately transition to the appropriate healthcare professional.

This balance is what makes agentic experience orchestration practical for health care. AI coordinates operational work while people continue to provide clinical expertise, empathy and judgment.

Building tomorrow’s health care, today

The future of health care won’t arrive through one transformational AI deployment. It will be built progressively as organisations connect more workflows, reduce operational friction and create shared context across the patient journey.

Healthcare entities already improving scheduling, referrals, patient access and contact centre operations through AI-enabled automation are creating the foundation for more sophisticated orchestration in the future. As workflows become increasingly connected and context moves seamlessly across the patient journey, organisations will be able to coordinate complex experiences safely and at scale.

Agentic experience orchestration offers a practical path forward by reducing administrative burden, improving patient access and enabling healthcare professionals to focus where they make the greatest difference in delivering exceptional patient care.

*Tara Mahoney is Global VP of Healthcare at Genesys.

Top image credit: iStock.com/Jacob Wackerhausen