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Looking Ahead: How AI Agents Will Make EHRs Even More Productive

By AxiomEHR | January 28, 2025

By Khalid Al-Maskari

Artificial intelligence, the topic du jour and deservedly so, comes in different flavors: Chatbots give you answers. Autonomous vehicles help you go places. Face recognition confirms identities. Now, an emerging category of artificial intelligence can do tedious tasks for you. Agents. They’re a particularly exciting development for integrated health care.

There’s a good chance you’ve heard of agents. Agents are “AI-enabled applications capable of perceiving their environment, making decisions, and taking actions to achieve specific goals,” writes Computerworld. “The key word here is ‘agency,’ which allows the software to take action on its own.” According to a Deloitte report, 25% of companies that use Gen AI will launch AI agent pilots or proofs of concept in 2025

Here’s a simple example of an AI agent in action: Imagine telling your phone your daughter’s birthday is coming up. Agents can invite family and friends, schedule a party based on their availability, buy gifts, and order food to be delivered. Agents can adapt to variable conditions they encounter in both the digital and real worlds. And they often interact with other agents across functions, applications, and domains.

I’m convinced agents will bolster our efforts to transform EHR systems into even more powerful tools for value-based care, lightening administrative loads that have historically burned out therapists, clinicians, and support staff. They certainly present an important new opportunity for AxiomEHR users.

Agents in Action

Take the insidious problem of no-shows in health care organizations. No-shows cost the health care system $150 billion annually. Various studies have shown providers’ no-show rates average 5.5% to 50% — a range that can easily drive a single provider’s losses into the millions. A 20% no-show rate might cost a clinic that schedules 100 patients per day $20,000 per week. That’s $1 million per year.

Agents will send automated appointment reminders asking patients to confirm, reschedule, or cancel their appointment. AI will have already identified patients most likely to miss their appointment. To maximize revenue, agents will be ready to fill likely gaps with patients on a waiting list. Staff will get updates as preferred. AI agents will also carry out post-appointment follow-up, scheduling medication, sending prescriptions to the pharmacy, and making follow-up appointments for the patient. 

With AxiomEHR, agents are already capturing conversations during doctor visits and using transcripts and AI agents to populate treatment plans, suggest diagnoses, and drive cost-effective coding and revenue processes. In the future, AI agents will increasingly empower patients in their own care, synthesizing data from wearables like smartwatches and smart rings to fine-tune care. 

Orchestrating Agents

AI in health care is moving so fast that agents are being upstaged at the bleeding edge by the next jaw-dropping technology advancement, multiagent (MAS) systems. A multiagent system is a collection of agents carrying out complex objectives. They can be orchestrated by a conductor agent, linked in a chained workflow, assigned self-executing roles, and directed to aggregate information or reach consensus. Look for MAS in patient care, telemedicine, diagnosis, drug discovery, imaging, and elsewhere.

The future is exciting, and we’ve got to get it right. As bullish as I am on AI, I’m certain that humans will remain in the loop at every stage of health care. The difference is they’ll work faster, smarter, and happier. There will be less burnout and we’ll reach new heights of value-based care.

Picture of Khalid Al-Maskari

Khalid Al-Maskari

Khalid Al-Maskari is the founder and CEO of Health Information Management Systems, a Tucson, AZ-based company that designs Electronic Health Records (EHR) software to transform the integrated health care experience. HiMS creates innovative solutions that lead to better outcomes, lower costs, and higher-quality care. 

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