As healthcare moves from “more channels” to “outcomes,” the industry needs a new kind of platform that can coordinate complex communications workflows and orchestrate them across silos. That’s what’s behind the need for agentic healthcare communications (AHC), a new category of software that automates communication needs across the healthcare landscape.

If you’re new to the idea of AHC or are just hearing about it for the first time, this FAQ is for you. Read on to learn more about what agentic healthcare communications is (and what it isn’t), as well as how it works, and why it differs from other software categories on the market today.

What is agentic healthcare communications?

Agentic healthcare communications – or AHC for short – is a new category of software used by the healthcare industry to automate communication workflows between all entities in the healthcare landscape. These communications can occur between patients, providers, and payors (often referred to as insurance companies). 

AHC solutions use autonomous AI agents to automate workflows end to end, and can manage complex, multi-party workflows across multiple channels – for example, phone calls, text messages, video, chat, email, web, fax, etc. The AI agents do not just assist people; they can act independently to complete conversations or transactions that traditionally have only been handled by call center agents or healthcare staff.

How do agentic healthcare communications platforms work?

AHC platforms are a system of action. They take a goal like “complete a benefit verification” or “follow up with a patient about their recent infusion,” then plan the steps, act across channels (phone, text, email, etc.), and produce evidence that the job is done. Under the hood, they authenticate identity and consent, ground decisions in healthcare policies/SOPs and source systems, and use guardrails, confidence thresholds, and/or human-in-the-loop to decide when to continue or escalate to a person with full context. AHC platforms enable users to measure outcomes rather than just minutes or messages sent.

Why would I need an agentic healthcare communications platform now?

In short order, the healthcare industry went from using AI agents only in demos to using them in production, with growing frequency and task complexity. The next chapter of AI in healthcare will involve organizations growing from using a single AI agent in a singular use case, to using multiple AI agents across multiple areas – and, in fact, we’re seeing this adoption happen faster than any other tech adoption curve in recent memory. As healthcare entities increasingly adopt AI agents, the need for a centralized way to consistently build, monitor and manage their AI agents will become critical. Agentic healthcare communications technologies make doing so possible.

What makes Infinitus an agentic healthcare communications platform?

Infinitus is the first agentic healthcare communications platform that safely automates clinical and administrative conversations consistently and reliably at scale. Our platform helps organizations overcome barriers to care, reduce costs, and improve patient and provider experiences.

We combine state-of-the-art AI models, industry-leading AI guardrails, a dynamic knowledge graph, and integrations with leading systems of record such as Salesforce, enabling our AI agents to engage patients, payors, and providers, thereby helping customers reduce costs, drive revenue, and improve patient experience.

As mentioned above, AHC solutions are AI-driven systems that manage complex, multi-party workflows across multiple channels through autonomous software agents. This is exactly what the Infinitus platform does.

Are agentic healthcare communications platforms voice AI platforms?

Agentic healthcare communications platforms go beyond voice AI as they support additional communication channels. AHCs  are built to plan, act, and prove outcomes across payors, providers, and patients – over the phone, yes, but also text, email, fax, and so forth. AHC platforms offer voice AI agents, but you should think of voice as one channel the platform offers. A good AHC platform will have strong voice capabilities – but a strong voice AI product alone doesn’t make a solution AHC.

What channels do agentic healthcare communications platforms support? Are there any channels that they do not support?

By definition, AHC platforms are omnichannel, and are capable of supporting whichever channels your organization includes in your communications strategies. That includes phone, text, email, chat, web, fax, and so forth. These AI agents can be used to engage or assist internal audiences, such as your contact center, or with external audiences, such as your patients, provider or KOLs. 

What problems does an AHC platform solve that my current stack doesn’t

AHC platforms like Infinitus solve the gap between moving messages and moving care forward. Where CCaaS and UCaaS, for example, excel at routing, queues, and agent productivity, an AHC platform coordinates the actual multi-party steps across payors, providers, and patients – spanning phone, text, portals, email, fax, and so forth. It encodes healthcare SOPs, payor policies, and patient context so agents can plan the next step, choose the right tool (e.g., API vs. call), and escalate to a human with full context when judgment is required. This reduces cycle time and handoffs, redundant questions/work, shrinks hold/transfer loops, increases first-pass success, and keeps tone/logic consistent across channels and teams.

Or to put it another way: horizontal categories manage channels and people; AHC orchestrates end-to-end healthcare workflows over the systems you already have.

How are agentic healthcare communications platforms different from CCaaS platforms?

Contact center as a service (CCaaS) as solutions such as AWS Connect, Genesys, NICe, and Five9, enable customer service departments to manage multichannel customer interactions holistically from both a customer-experience and employee-experience perspective. 

While general CCaaS platforms are built to route calls and manage human agents, their AI is general and lacks the necessary vertical domain content or knowledge to act independently. Agentic healthcare communications solutions overcome this by deploying goal-driven AI that does more than just handle the interaction; it knows the appropriate next best step – such as how to submit a prior authorization or schedule an appointment that requires multi-party coordination (patient, payor, provider). AHCs enables this by integrating deeply with industry-specific data sources like EHRs and Clearinghouses, with all interactions taking place within a secure and compliant agentic environment that standard CCaaS platforms cannot match.

How are agentic healthcare communications platforms different from UCaaS platforms?

Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) solutions – from vendors like RingCentral, Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Cisco Webex – are primarily designed to consolidate business telephony, external PSTN connectivity, and collaboration features (messaging, meetings) into a single cloud platform. They excel at improving staff collaboration and internal productivity.

Agentic healthcare communications platforms, conversely, are built for internal and external engagements. While UCaaS provides the communication infrastructure (the phone lines, video stream, etc.), it lacks the necessary vertical intelligence, context, and connectivity to act independently in workflows. AHC solutions overcome this by deploying goal-driven agentic AI that not only handles the communication but knows the appropriate next best step for a patient or provider. AHC enables this by integrating deeply with industry-specific data sources, and it is designed with the explicit healthcare safety guardrails and compliance features needed for secure patient data handling, a requirement standard UCaaS platforms often cannot meet.

When is AHC not a fit?

When an organization’s complexity, scale, and workflow burden are low, agentic healthcare communications solutions may not be the optimal fit or provide sufficient return on investment (ROI) compared to simpler communication tools.

AHC is designed to manage the high volume, high complexity, and multi-system coordination inherent in large-scale healthcare operations. It is generally not a fit for organizations characterized by the following:

  • Small patient populations or limited scale: AHC’s value is derived from automating high volumes of repetitive, complex tasks. Organizations with smaller patient populations may not have the transaction volume necessary to justify the platform’s initial implementation and ongoing operational costs.
  • Narrow payor/Health plan acceptance: The complexity AHC solves often comes from navigating varied coverage rules across hundreds of health plans. Organizations that accept only a small set of health plans (e.g., exclusively Medicare or just a handful of commercial payors) have a much simpler administrative environment that can often be managed effectively by traditional systems or less-specialized automation.
  • Straightforward care journeys: AHC is essential when workflows are messy, such as those involving variable patient benefits, multi-step prior authorization requirements, or highly variable coverage based on the site of care or administration method. If a company’s core therapies or services are consistently covered and rarely require complex administrative processes, the need for AHC’s autonomous, goal-driven orchestration is significantly reduced.
  • Small call center teams: AHC is intended to augment or replace large numbers of agents handling administrative tasks. For small call center teams (e.g., under 10 people), the initial investment in AHC, coupled with the need to integrate across multiple systems, typically outweighs the savings achieved through automating a limited number of agent hours. Simpler automation or well-trained human agents may be more cost-effective