What is Agentic Healthcare?

Agentic Healthcare is a blog about the application of AI agents to healthcare workflows.

I'm Dr. Peter Phua, a Canadian-trained physician with an interest in AI for healthcare.

A lot has been written about the healthcare crisis in Canada, a system which is currently in crisis at every level. We are facing simultaneous crises in primary care, outpatient procedure availability, specialist access, emergency rooms, overloaded hospitals, and long-term care.

What is at the root of all these problems?

Every complex system - and every complex problem - is multifactorial.

But I think that much of the discourse on this topic loses sight of the forest for the trees.

The underlying reason our healthcare system is in crisis is because elderly patients need a lot of care and our demographic pyramid is inverting.

Simply put, the tax base is shrinking relative to the population that needs a lot of medical care.

Most government proposals around improving the system boil down to marginal re-allocation of existing resources - increasing the local funding for xyz outpatient program/hospital, etc.

Unsurprisingly, the system-level crisis never improves, and only gets worse as a result. Many Western countries are facing similar problems.

What is needed is a complete paradigm shift in how we think about the healthcare crisis in Canada.

It is my view that we should view the healthcare crisis as a technology problem.

Specifically, we need to view this as an AI technology problem.

What we desperately need are AI agents to act as force multipliers for our existing clinicians, which facilitate the following:

• We need AI agents that help clinicians see patients 2x, 3x, or 4x faster, substantially expanding the available supply of medical services.
• We need AI agents that increase the quality and safety of medical care, improving the quality of medical care at the scale of the system.

In my next post, I'll talk about what needs to be built.