Healthcare Is Short on People, But AI Is Closing the Gap
AI agents in healthcare relieve clinicians of administrative burdens and improve access for underserved communities. Here are four examples.
Key Takeaways
You open an email from your doctor’s office expecting a routine physical reminder. Instead, it’s a closure notice. The practice is shutting down, and you’re one of thousands being absorbed into already overextended clinics. When you call to transfer records, you reach a busy signal or, worse, an overwhelmed staff trying to manage a spike in patients.
This isn’t an isolated story. The U.S. faces a projected shortage of up to 86,000 physicians by 2036, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges. The problem is even more acute in the nursing sector.
While the shortage is national, the impact on patients is felt most acutely on the local level. Nearly 100 million Americans already live in Health Professional Shortage Areas (HPSAs), where access to basic care often requires long waits to get an appointment, and long drives to get there once patients do. But the crisis of healthcare access isn’t exclusive to rural areas. Patients in major urban centers may have shorter drive times but they, too, feel the effect of logistical gridlock.
AI is bridging these healthcare deserts by powering sophisticated telehealth platforms that bring specialist expertise to remote areas, effectively erasing the miles between a patient’s home and the care they need. By acting as a digital bridge, AI ensures that a person’s health isn’t dictated by their proximity to a major medical hub.
The shortage isn’t just about a lack of new doctors; it’s also about the ones we already have being driven to the breaking point by mountains of administrative work. A 2025 Salesforce study found that administrative overload delays care and drives clinicians out of the profession entirely. Fifty-nine percent of administrators and clinicians report that time spent on paperwork erodes job satisfaction, fueling retention problems in an already strained workforce. Face time with patients shrinks, and the work that drew people to healthcare gets crowded out by billing codes and insurance forms.
AI agents in healthcare are stepping in as a digital partner to handle the paperwork, clearing the administrative hurdles that keep doctors from their patients and helping overextended clinics finally catch their breath. AI-powered systems, including those using AI agents, are now absorbing these burdens at scale.
Here’s how four healthcare companies are putting AI tools to work to give their clinicians room to breathe and their patients better access to care.
UChicago Medicine turns friction into proactive care
For nearly a century, UChicago Medicine has been a leader in medical discovery. But leadership identified a troubling gap: While the organization excelled at breakthrough treatments, patients struggled with basic healthcare logistics, like scheduling appointments, reaching the right department, and getting timely reminders for preventive care, a situation Chief Marketing Officer Andrew Chang called “unacceptable.”
The numbers told the story. The 150-person customer service team handled over 2.5 million calls annually, with most routed to voicemail or bounced between departments that lacked access to complete patient information. Meanwhile, the team needed to deliver personalized outreach based on each patient’s health requirements, risk factors, and communication preferences — a nearly impossible feat with its existing systems.
UChicago Medicine built 100 patient segments in Data 360 in just four months, each tailored to specific needs, risk factors, and behaviors. By integrating clinical and service data, the health system replaced generic mass emails with targeted, contextually relevant communications. For example, the system now identifies patients due for their first mammogram and sends personalized scheduling invitations at the right time.
The system also identifies and notifies patients who are at risk for cervical cancer; over half of them scheduled crucial medical appointments they might otherwise have missed.
In the future, UChicago Medicine plans to augment its phone support with Agentforce Voice — an AI-powered voice agent for phone, web, and mobile — for tasks like appointment scheduling, prescription refills, and directions.
It’s also close to launching Agentforce-powered chat features on its website. Agentforce is the agentic layer of the Agentforce 360 Platform. The first AI agent will handle everyday questions like “Where should I park for my MRI?” or “Do you have a dermatology clinic?”
By offloading these logistical hurdles to intelligent agents, UChicago Medicine is helping patients reclaim their time, before they even meet with their doctor.
“We can use data to track when one of our parking lots is full,” said Chang. “How cool would it be if, 30 minutes before your appointment, you got an alert from your hospital saying, ‘Parking A garage is full, Parking B has plenty of space.’ This has nothing to do with the exam room, yet has a huge impact on your healthcare experience.”
Transcend automates busywork to save patients from treatment disruptions
For Transcend, a provider of personalized wellness and hormone replacement therapy, expanding healthcare access goes beyond scheduling appointments and identifying risk factors. It also means making sure that quality of care remains high when patient volume dramatically rises.
When demand for remote care surged during the Covid-19 pandemic, Transcend’s licensed specialists found themselves swamped by administrative tasks. They toggled between disconnected platforms, manually verified treatment eligibility, cross-checked drug interactions, and entered the same data multiple times.
The result: Specialists spent less time counseling patients and more time on paperwork. Worse, fragmented systems increased the risk of treatment disruptions that could trigger withdrawal symptoms, like hot flashes or insomnia.
Get a first look at how businesses are using AI agents
Explore how agents are already helping companies across sales, service, internal operations and more.
Transcend is planning to use Agentforce to handle the administrative burden. When patients ask about medication interactions or treatment options, an AI agent will validate dosage information, check lab results against safety standards, and flag potential complications, tasks that previously required manual record reviews across multiple systems. The AI can spot, for instance, that a patient’s blood pressure medication might interact with a requested peptide treatment, and suggest safer alternatives.
By unifying patient data from electronic health records, pharmacy partners, and diagnostic labs into a single system, the agent will give specialists complete patient profiles. It will autonomously handle eligibility verification, medication compatibility checks, and compliance validation, work that consumes hours of specialist time.
The company expects the technology to increase response times by 30%; reduce manual administrative work by 40%; and speed up order cycles by 25%, with fewer errors. Even better, specialists will be able to redirect that reclaimed time toward providing expert guidance, recommending behavioral therapy, and building deeper patient relationships.
AI agents will “enhance Transcend’s customer support, improving efficiency and making it easier for more people to access treatment,” said Brian Glass, CIO of Transcend.
Precina flips the script on a chronic disease in rural America
Healthcare company Precina is on a mission to end type 2 diabetes, particularly in rural and underserved communities. It’s getting there with AI.
In the corners of rural Louisiana, its pilot program achieved something remarkable. In just 12 weeks, a group of patients saw their A1C levels, a key marker of blood sugar control, drop from a dangerous 9.6% to a healthier 6.4%. By contrast, traditional medical models usually take an entire year to achieve just a 1% reduction.
The traditional healthcare system is built on sporadic interventions: Patients occasionally see a doctor and hope for the best. Precina flipped the script. By using Agentforce, the company has created a digital workforce that bridges the gap between appointments, providing daily personalized advice to build healthy habits.
“We want to scale fast, especially in underserved, rural, and low-income communities,” said Josiah Bryan, chief technology officer and lead AI researcher at Precina. “We want to help the millions of people who need these services.”
To realize its ambition to serve patients nationally — Precina operates in just a handful of states today — it needed to improve its tech platform and processes.
Using Agentforce, the company has moved from quarterly check-ups to a 24/7 continuous care loop. Patients no longer wait months to discuss a new lifestyle habit or dosage adjustment; instead, AI agents tap into real-time health data to offer tailored lifestyle suggestions and instantly coordinate refills. It’s an approach that helps both patients and the business. By automating routine outreach and administrative hurdles, Precina is saving an estimated $80,000 annually for every 5,000 patients.
And with AI handling the busywork, clinicians can now focus on higher-impact care for people who might otherwise be left out.
“In my lifetime, I want to help a billion people improve their health and have a better life because of the work we’re doing,” said founder and CEO John Oberg.
Simplyhealth combines scalable support with a human touch
As a Certified B Corp, healthcare solutions provider Simplyhealth balances social impact with its bottom line. For 150 years, the UK-based company has improved access to healthcare by helping its members find and fund affordable care for common medical needs. Its mission: Remove barriers between people and the care they need.
The company handles more than 335,000 service requests each year. But the majority are routine inquiries like claim status checks, password resets, and basic FAQs, which eat up resources better spent on complex cases requiring human expertise.
The solution: Simplyhealth uses Agentforce to autonomously answer general questions and handle routine tasks, like guiding members through claim submissions. To make sure the agent surfaces the most relevant information, it’s integrated with Data 360, which lets it tap into data from Sales Cloud and Simplyhealth’s own policy documents in real time.
Check out the short video below to see how Simplyhealth is using AI to improve access.
If a member’s inquiry requires human support, which is especially crucial for vulnerable populations like the elderly, Agentforce will seamlessly escalate the conversation to a live rep. Each hand-off will include a summary of the conversation so the rep has full context to efficiently resolve the inquiry.
The automation has helped Simplyhealth serve twice as many members a day than before, and save about 100 hours a week on repetitive tasks.
But automation is only part of the story. The company also needed the agent to communicate with members in a human and compassionate way. To do that, Agentforce pulls tonality guidelines and best practices from Simplyhealth’s resource library, which contains data from its service reps’ experiences with members.
“Our knowledge base is built on empathy and putting the member at the heart, which is our natural way of operating,” said Claudia Nicholls, Simplyhealth’s chief customer officer. “We’re working closely with our teams to ensure our AI agent doesn’t just work like us, it sounds like us. We choose clear, familiar language, and avoid jargon.”
Simplyhealth is exploring adding new agents for case management, quote generation, and campaign creation. The ultimate goal is to build its membership while maintaining a high level of customer care, at scale.
“The technology is business critical and helps us grow by allowing us to remove the barriers to healthcare access and be available 24/7,” said Nicholls.
AI agents in healthcare make continuous care possible
Healthcare doesn’t have the luxury of slow fixes. Demand is rising, the workforce is strained, and administrative burdens pull clinicians away from patients. What’s emerging across these organizations is a different model of care: one where intelligence runs quietly in the background, connecting signals, removing friction, and keeping care moving between visits. The impact shows up in small but meaningful ways, such as fewer missed appointments, earlier interventions, faster answers, and more face time. Scaled across systems, those moments add up. This is how access expands, burnout eases, and care starts to feel continuous, not just during appointments.
