How Agentic AI Will Ease Healthcare’s Workforce Crisis.

Healthcare professionals are driven by a deep commitment to their patients, always striving to deliver top-notch care. Their dilemma? Healthcare workers are inundated with paperwork, according to new research from Salesforce, with 87% admitting they work late each week just to finish their administrative duties. This laborious work, as one might imagine, takes them away from time spent with patients. It also contributes to job burnout, a major concern as the industry faces painful turnover.

What’s more, the U.S. healthcare system averages $1 trillion in administrative spending annually, representing roughly 20% to 30% of total healthcare expenditure in the country.

But the days of wasteful expenditures, overworked staff, and suboptimal patient care may soon be coming to an end. As fate would have it, healthcare institutions stand to be major beneficiaries of agentic AI, as it can be the transformative tool used to completely rewire their industry. Take these three different healthcare trailblazers, for example, who are using Agentforce — the agentic layer of the Salesforce Platform — ‌to reimagine the future of the healthcare industry with digital labor.

Transcend works to reimagine telehealth

An innovator in the wellness industry, Transcend provides telehealth diagnostics and treatment plans to support health and fitness goals. They target root causes with scientific solutions that are customized to individual patient needs.

As demand for remote health grew, especially over the pandemic, ‌Transcend experienced a surge in client enrollment. Service reps found themselves multitasking far too often — handling orders, inputting data, and navigating multiple platforms to retrieve client information from various systems. The patient spike also took away from the white-glove approach they were accustomed to providing. The provider quickly decided it needed a new, technology-driven approach to its operations and care.

The Agentforce benefit: With Agentforce, Transcend will be able to meet demand 24/7 support with a limitless digital workforce. Its new agent-first approach will help its medical care clients start care immediately and keep up with it easily. Patients will be able to get immediate answers around a new treatment instead of waiting weeks to get a question answered in an appointment with their practitioner. Agentforce will help Transcend provide a premium, concierge-level experience that their clients expect.

Taking action: Always-on agents will also help Transcend differentiate itself from competitors by providing convenient customer service. For example, existing clients can immediately search for medication and text Agentforce with any questions as they begin their treatment. Powered by the Atlas Reasoning Engine — the brain behind Agentforce — the AI agent reviews data, surfaces insights, and takes action in real time. Once treatment begins, daily communication with a wellness concierge via SMS is facilitated.

When clients ask about a drug interaction, for example, Agentforce will automatically validate information, such as dosage or lab results, to ensure it meets safety standards. From there, Agentforce will connect them with Transcend’s wellness experts. In the past, this process was done manually and could slow client care. But Agentforce will soon take action on eligibility confirmation, autonomously verifying if a client qualifies for a service or treatment by reasoning across all of this data. With Agentforce, Transcend expects to improve response times by an estimated 30% and support more clients, faster.

“Agentforce will enhance Transcend’s customer support, improving efficiency and making it easier for more people to access treatment,” said Brian Glass, Chief Information Officer of Transcend.

Agentforce will enhance Transcend’s customer support, improving efficiency and making it easier for more people to access treatment.
Brian Glass, Chief Information Officer of Transcend

Precina Health dials in on specific treatment

Precina Health is another provider using Agentforce to improve the level of care it’s able to offer, especially for patients with type 2 diabetes. They do this through daily personalized support, targeting lifestyle factors like diet, exercise, and habits to improve outcomes faster.

The Agentforce benefit: With the prevalence of diagnosed diabetes increasing across all age groups from 2021-2023, Precina needed scalable infrastructure to expand its diabetes care model. With Agentforce, the healthcare provider is now able to automate outreach, scale check-ins, and deliver life-changing care for improved outcomes. Supported by the agentic layer of the Salesforce Platform, Precina revolutionizes how the company delivers diabetes care. And by automating routine tasks and enabling 24/7 support, Agentforce frees providers to focus on high-impact intervention, while saving Precina an estimated $80,000 per year in administrative load.

Taking action: Instead of a patient waiting months for a clinical visit to adjust a medication dose or review a new dietary habit, Agentforce works behind the scenes, tapping into Salesforce Health Cloud and Data Cloud to instantly access their medical records, lab results, and prescription history. It then uses that data — securely and in compliance with HIPAA standards — to deliver tailored suggestions, recommend incremental lifestyle changes, and even coordinate prescription refills. Agentforce will also expand payer coverage with autonomous outreach and allow Precina to train and coach clinicians faster and more cost-effectively.

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. With Agentforce, that dream of helping a billion people is a reality.
Dr. John Oberg, CEO of Precina Health

Rush University System for Health focuses on the patient experience

Leading healthcare provider, Rush, is also using Agentforce to improve the patient experience by providing more personalized and relevant interactions as well as timely interventions that result in higher quality care and outcomes — while reducing operating costs.

Rush found that the absence of a unified tool to connect all patient interactions was an obstacle. Timely access to care is crucial for Rush patients, and having a comprehensive understanding of the patient’s journey is essential. They saw an opportunity to enhance patient care through automation and digital interactions, positioning themselves to serve their patients even better.

The Agentforce benefit: Rush is implementing Agentforce autonomous agents to enhance the experience for all their users, thereby improving overall service efficiency and satisfaction.

Taking action: For the healthcare provider locator, these AI agents use advanced search capabilities to quickly find and recommend providers based on patient preferences, such as specialty and location, and are available 24/7 to reduce peak-hour call volumes

Rush significantly improved prescription filling and refill requests due to automations and integrations built by Salesforce. These enhancements include patient verification and real-time status updates, seamlessly integrated with local and affiliated pharmacies to ensure quick and accurate processing. This automation frees up human agents to tackle more complex and critical issues, boosting overall service efficiency and patient satisfaction. With Agentforce, Rush is taking it a step further where the patient doesn’t even need to interact with the human agent and can facilitate the whole workflow via the autonomous agent interaction.

By automating tasks, Rush aims to significantly reduce call volumes, decrease wait times, and improve patient satisfaction. This balanced approach ensures that human interactions are focused on the highest value activities, further enhancing the patient experience.

A new age of healthcare

Transcend, Precina Health, and Rush chose Agentforce as their digital labor platform because it’s deeply integrated with Health Cloud and Data Cloud, a hyperscale data platform built directly into Salesforce that provides access to critical company data and metadata.

Using Agentforce, these healthcare leaders can seamlessly manage key processes from medication checks and pricing approvals to eligibility confirmation and even scheduling, allowing them to focus their attention on providing personalized support where it matters most, driving better outcomes for their patients.

For more on the future of healthcare, discover Agentforce for Health.