Maxicare enhances patient care with Agentforce

HMO replaces a 20-minute manual process with a 30-second autonomous workflow.

Summary

Maxicare wanted to uphold its mission of providing affordable healthcare to Filipinos by increasing internal efficiency. Agentforce helps by turning time-consuming processes into digital workflows.

About

Maxicare is one of the oldest and largest health maintenance organisations (HMOs) in the Philippines, connecting 1.8 million members to over 20,000 medical specialists and 2,000 hospitals and clinics across the country.

The Results

500 %
Projected ROI
60 %
AI utilization with less than 3% of requests requiring human escalation
~ 40,000
requests automated monthly
20 minutes
saved per patient authorization

Increase efficiency to keep healthcare affordable.

Maxicare’s vision is to make healthcare affordable for every Filipino. However, healthcare costs are rising globally, meaning the business needed to find innovative ways to drive operational efficiency and avoid charging excessive premiums.

Dental was a natural place to look for efficiencies as dental benefits were heavily utilized and highly administrative. Before providing dental services, Maxicare’s partner clinics had to send Letter of Authorization (LOA) requests on behalf of members via SMS to a central processing team. A human agent would then manually verify coverage, leaving members and clinic staff waiting up to 20 minutes.

With 20,000 to 40,000 of these requests per month, the manual bottleneck became an error-prone process that couldn't scale with Maxicare’s growth or its ambitions for the member experience. 

Maxicare sought to automate this process and free its workforce to focus on providing higher-value services.

We knew that by moving away from a manual process, we could drive the internal efficiencies needed to keep our services affordable.

Jose Eduardo Hernandez
Process and Systems Excellence Head, Maxicare

Agentforce replaces manual workflow to accelerate care. 

Maxicare has adopted Agentforce as its system of agency, enabling it to build, deploy, and manage agents at scale across every channel. The HMO’s first agent automates the process of verifying members’ available coverage for dental care.  

The autonomous agent is grounded in three key principles: 

  • Data-aware reasoning: The agent pulls real-time eligibility and benefit limits directly from Maxicare’s core system. If a member’s plan does not include dental benefits, the agent can deliver an immediate ‘hard stop’ to the clinic.
  • Clinical intelligence: Instead of using a rigid decision tree, the agent uses advanced reasoning to understand intent and determine whether specific procedures are covered under a member’s policy. This may require the agent to clarify details, such as whether an extraction is simple or if the tooth is impacted.
  • Trusted autonomous action: The agent doesn't just provide information, but executes workflows and autonomously triggers the LOA generation in just 30 seconds. With the Agentforce Trust Layer, governance and observability are built in; sensitive patient health information is protected, and medical guidelines are strictly followed.

Within eight months of operation, the agent has reached 60% AI utilization, with fewer than 3% of requests requiring human escalation. The impact is significant, with ~40,000 LOA requests now automated monthly.

We’ve reduced what was a 20-minute manual data-entry process, down to just 30 seconds with Agentforce.

Jose Eduardo Hernandez
Process and Systems Excellence Head, Maxicare

Automating routine requests allows human experts to focus where they’re needed most.

Agentforce knows when to bring in human experts, ensuring complex cases receive the necessary clinical oversight without delays. While routine cleanings and simple extractions are processed autonomously, some procedures require a deeper review. For example, while an agent can identify if a member is eligible for a wisdom tooth extraction, it knows that Maxicare’s policy requires a clinical review of surgical procedures to ensure medical necessity.

Instead of forcing the clinic coordinator to call a separate hotline or wait for an email, Agentforce connects them to a dental supervisor and automatically passes along the gathered context, including the patient's card number, the clinical intent, and the tooth number. The dental supervisor can then review the summarized details and make a judgment call in under 60 seconds.

The agent does the triage and gathers the clinical context from multiple sources, allowing our human experts to step in when needed and make a final judgement call.

Jose Eduardo Hernandez
Process and Systems Excellence Head, Maxicare

Unified platform for service paves the way for Maxicare to become an agentic enterprise. 

Maxicare’s deployment of agentic AI builds upon the business’ existing foundation with Salesforce. Previously, the HMO deployed Agentforce Service to orchestrate omnichannel care across voice, video, and live chat, while adopting Agentforce Marketing to manage SMS communications.

With access to Agentforce 360 for Health and Data 360, Maxicare aims to build on this momentum to better serve and engage its members. It also plans to extend its use of Agentforce to resolve more high-volume requests, eventually handling 100% of its non-voice traffic with agents. This transformation is expected to drive a massive 500% return on investment, while empowering the business to reallocate employees from tedious data entry to high-value clinical support roles.

With Agentforce, we aren’t just looking at efficiency, but projecting a 500% return on investment.

Jose Eduardo Hernandez
Process and Systems Excellence Head, Maxicare

Maxicare’s success with Agentforce shows that starting with a single, targeted agentic use case can make a significant impact. The business’ first agent uses clinical intelligence to reason through complex requests and either autonomously execute workflows or hand off to a human where required. 

Looking ahead, Maxicare plans to implement AI-driven workflows across other areas of the business and is exploring the benefits of migrating 100% of its non-voice traffic to digital agents. By building with Agentforce, the HMO can deploy new automations in days rather than months, all while protecting sensitive patient information.

We see Agentforce as the primary engine that will help us scale our operations and continue making healthcare accessible to every Filipino.

Jose Eduardo Hernandez
Process and Systems Excellence Head, Maxicare

Maxicare chose to manage the Agentforce implementation in-house to maintain control and agility. The IT team collaborated closely with Salesforce solutions experts, who provided coaching and high-level guidance on agentic concepts. 

The team’s agile approach enabled them to build and go live with their first agent in just four weeks from initial concept. The Maxicare team also gained the skills needed to make rapid adjustments later on, rather than being dependent on outside vendors. 

Maxicare shared that one of the key learnings from its rollout is that implementing AI doesn’t need to be a big, complex project to have a tremendous impact, as long as you identify a simple use case with a clear business goal. It also found that agentic AI requires rethinking the design approach and shifting from traditional, deterministic development to goal-oriented concepts of defining roles, reasoning, and adding guardrails. Ultimately, this mindset shift allows automations to be built in days rather than months, provided there is strong observability and monitoring in place.

Salesforce didn't just build a tool with us - they helped us understand agentic concepts so we could deliver a working prototype in record time.

Jose Eduardo Hernandez
Process and Systems Excellence Head, Maxicare