Chetan Dube, AI pioneer and founder and chief executive of Quant, explains how to future-proof patient care with agentic AI.
Artificial intelligence is no longer only a back-end tool for scheduling, billing, or scanning X-rays. Agentic AI is poised to change the world of healthcare more rapidly and positively than any technology before. In fact, 68% of healthcare businesses are already using agentic AI in some form. The advantage agentic systems have over all other versions of AI is that rather than waiting for human instructions, they can take initiative, reason through complex tasks, and act on their own within defined limits.
Agentic AI systems are designed to behave like a capable medical assistant. They can monitor patients, anticipate needs, coordinate care, and even draft clinical notes. The goal isn’t to replace doctors or nurses, but to free them from the constant administrative load and help them focus on maximising patient care.
The current climate is one of rising costs, workforce shortages, and ageing populations. This puts hospitals and clinics under extraordinary pressure to deliver more care with fewer people. Agentic AI offers a solution by enhancing human decision-making and making healthcare systems more adaptive, efficient, and resilient. There are four areas in which agentic AI provides immediate help to future-proof patient care.
Proactive patient monitoring
Traditional patient monitoring systems collect data points like heart rate, oxygen levels and glucose readings, but rely on humans to interpret the results. Agentic AI can continuously review vital signs, lab results, or wearable device data, and then act on what it finds. If a patient’s blood oxygen drops, for instance, the AI can alert a nurse, cross-check recent medications, and even schedule an immediate assessment.
That kind of real-time monitoring can catch problems before they become emergencies. For patients with chronic conditions, early intervention prevents complications, shortens hospital stays and lowers costs. This is a win-win for both patients and providers.
Fragmentation in healthcare has always been an issue for both providers and patients. One patient seeking a treatment or cure could have to visit multiple specialists, then undergo lab tests, and even more follow-up visits. Each of these stops on the journey would be managed by different teams using different systems. Agentic AI can coordinate across those silos, automatically updating records, scheduling appointments, and ensuring that everyone involved has the right information at the right time.
Agentic removes the chance of a provider or patient missing a call, text, fax, email, or chat message and makes the process simple. This results in fewer delays, fewer errors and less friction for both patients and staff.
Personalised treatment support
A staggering example of how agentic AI can create more precise and effective personalised care is taking place at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in Manhattan. Its researchers have collected and preserved detailed patient records going back over 100 years. That data, originally gathered for clinical purposes, has become a cornerstone of the centre’s modern research strategy. Every cancer case offers new insights not only into the individual patient but into the disease itself, how it mutates, spreads and responds to treatment.
The scale of this information is staggering. Every human genome contains roughly three billion base pairs, equivalent to about 30 gigabytes of raw data. To analyse just four genomes for a single research project requires about a petabyte of storage. Identifying a single mutation or understanding a particular protein behaviour demands massive computational power.
“Without the power of computing and AI, it’s just too much for individual researchers to do,” said Tsvi Gal, chief technology officer and head of enterprise technology services there.
Knowing that even the best researched care plans often need to adapt in real time, having this type of data at the ready is revolutionary. Agentic AI can analyse the current patient, and then compare their data to all of the data from the past century, and recommend personalised treatment options that can be modified based on how similar patients responded to the same therapy.
This kind of adaptive intelligence helps physicians make more informed decisions, especially in complex cases. Over time, it can turn every hospital into a “learning system,” where each new patient encounter improves care for the next.
Reducing administrative burden
In 2024, physicians in the US worked on average 57.8 hours a week. Of those hours, only 27.2 were direct patient care. They averaged 13 hours on order entry, documentation, test results and referrals, and another 7.3 hours on admin tasks like prior authorisation, insurance forms and meetings. Agentic AI can potentially remove 20 hours of work from a doctor’s plate.
By cutting administrative work, hospitals can address one of the main drivers of clinician burnout while improving billing accuracy and cash flow. It’s one of the few technologies that simultaneously helps both caregivers and revenue.
Healthcare organisations that integrate agentic AI early will gain efficiency and adaptability. As value-based care expands and margins tighten, the ability to predict, personalise, and automate care will become a core differentiator.
Hospitals that use agentic systems to coordinate care more effectively, reduce waste, and deliver better outcomes will naturally attract patients, staff, and partners. Agentic AI is the next step toward a healthcare system that is not only smarter, but also more human and gives clinicians the ability to focus the overwhelming percentage of their time on direct patient care.
