Much of my work this year has centered on one question: How can healthcare feel more human?
Across research sessions, we heard the same themes: clinicians overwhelmed by admin work, patients navigating fragmented systems and hard-to-use devices, caregivers and care teams stretched thin trying to connect the dots between people, data, insurance, and medical decisions past and present.
It’s a design problem as much as a technology one.
As we reflect on that work, we’ve started exploring how agentic AI, systems that can reason, plan, and act with the intention of improving our health, might begin to close those gaps.
From a human-centered design perspective, the goal isn’t to automate care, it’s to build the foundations for a 360° view of health, where patients and clinicians finally see the same picture: connected data, coordinated care, and transparency across systems.
Our work this year has touched on five areas that bring that future a little closer:
- Care Coordination: Agents that quietly handle follow-ups, lab scheduling, and reminders so clinicians can focus on patients.
- Knowledge Updates: Agents that surface relevant clinical evidence in context, reducing the cognitive load of staying current.
- Medication Safety: Agents that catch potential interactions and suggest safer options in real time.
- Peer Collaboration: Agents that connect clinicians to the right expertise, curating collective insight from trusted peers.
- Operational Efficiency: Agents that simplify scheduling, referrals, and resource flow, the invisible friction that costs time and energy.
Each one starts with empathy for a real human pain point, not an algorithmic one.
From there, it’s about mapping the blueprints for what comes next, not automating what we have today but designing something truly new that serves people and moves us closer to that full-circle view of health.
Getting there won’t be easy. Medicine is complex and deeply personal and layering AI technology into a space this private will test every boundary of trust, transparency, and design.
But that’s the work ahead, and in the coming weeks, I’ll be sharing more about how we’re approaching it through a human-centered lens.