AI’s role in patient-centric care 

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Have you ever wanted to break up with your doctor—not because of the practitioner, but because of the difficulty in engaging with their practice? You’re not alone. I’ve left doctors for that reason and McKinsey has found that nearly 25% of consumers have delayed care because they hate everything about the process. System complexity is not doctors’ fault, but making the care experience easier for patients is now their—and their teams’—burden. And that burden is only increasing. With generative AI reaching a tipping point, practices that can’t adopt the technology to engage patients with a consumer-grade experience will soon face an existential crisis.   

In virtually every other aspect of our lives—from banking and shopping to transportation and vacation planning—technology has dramatically improved the consumer experience, catering to convenience and access. But not in healthcare, where the experience of being a patient still differs widely from practice to practice. There are offices where booking a routine medical appointment can feel more stressful than booking a flight to Melbourne or negotiating insurance approval for a standard treatment feels out of reach.  

While healthcare’s digital revolution has stubbornly lagged other industries, that is now shifting. Patients are beginning to flex their consumer muscles, demanding digital convenience that enhances human connection. And they’re increasingly starting to vote with their feet when they don’t get the digital attention they need. We see this with the uptick in patients turning to urgent care clinics for more than just colds, because of the flexibility and digital access they provide.  

At the same time, much of the technology aimed at improving patient experience has, so far, created more work for doctors. These compounding factors are pushing an already burdened ecosystem towards its limits.  

But there is a way forward. And it’s based on understanding that the ability to deliver a consumer-grade patient experience requires a better practice experience, one where physicians and administrators alike can spend their time on what matters most: delivering patient care.  

An AI “aha” moment 

Until recently, many physicians have struggled to realize the value of AI in their practice. The introduction of ambient listening technology has changed the equation, creating an industry-wide revelation. This AI-based voice recognition technology has quickly proven its ability to shave off hours of time on notetaking, documentation, and entering preliminary information to assist in billing patient encounters. Doctors who were previously plagued by “pajama time”—hours spent catching up on patient documentation work at home—feel liberated by AI-powered ambient listening.   

And the research supports that the optimism is more than anecdotal. athenahealth’s annual Physician Sentiment Survey found a positive shift in physicians’ opinions of AI. This year, only 27% of surveyed physicians believe AI to be overhyped or unable to meet expectations (down from 40% a year ago), and the majority of physicians who previously reported using AI in their practice (68%) are using it more frequently to generate clinical documentation.  

Beyond the important work to streamline operations, AI is also increasingly working as an intelligence layer that enables doctors to spend less time hunting for facts and more time acting on insights at the moment of care, allowing their practices to offer a better experience for patients and staff.  

The rise of AI agents 

What am I excited about seeing in 2025? AI applications on the horizon that can deliver on the promise of a more consumer-friendly, human experience—one that shifts physicians’ attention away from the computer screen and back toward their patients. Recently, I was at the HIMSS conference, an annual gathering of healthcare technology leaders. While last year’s conference centered on generative AI hype, with few applications in sight, this year showed real world impact and a more tangible roadmap of coming applications—including agentic AI.  

AI agents have been operating behind the scenes in many industries for years, but large language models are giving them the ability to perform more complex tasks, such as answering certain patient questions and managing front office work. We are already seeing these agentic AI applications in our app store Marketplace of partner tools (for instance Salesforce’s Agentforce for Health), and are exploring agentic AI throughout our solutions, such as in improving the revenue cycle management process. As the technology enables practices to function more efficiently, those improvements will be felt by their patients, whose needs can be met faster and more directly.  

The benefits are real 

As a health tech marketer and executive, I understand both the challenge and the opportunity ahead. As I wrote about AI previously in Fast Company: “Just as important as building and evolving the technology is our ability to market AI’s benefits to physicians and patients alike, to ensure that it’s leveraged to help reclaim what’s at the heart of exceptional care: a meaningful patient-physician relationship.”  

I believe the recent AI advances have demonstrated that the benefits are real. That we, as patients, can finally stop checking our consumer expectations at the door of our doctors’ office. And that better care is within our reach—not despite technology, but because of it.  

Stacy Simpson is chief marketing officer of athenahealth. 

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