Empathy is critical in healthcare. Yet providing an empathetic patient journey isn’t always easy. While AI has already begun to make patient interactions more personalised and efficient, the evolution of agentic AI is giving rise to the possibility of virtual personal care concierges that can act autonomously to anticipate needs and deliver the personalisation, timing and foresight required to achieve a more empathetic patient experience.
At its core, an empathetic patient experience involves interactions and experiences that demonstrate an understanding of and care for the patient’s specific needs and feelings. In the context of the patient journey, this often equates to the most appropriate message, at the most appropriate time, through the most appropriate channel.
Everyone wants to feel heard, understood and helped. To get it right, healthcare administration teams sometimes need to be able to pre-empt patient needs. Doing this manually, for every patient, would take extensive resources. But AI-based tools embedded in customer engagement platforms are making it possible to achieve at scale.
There’s an agent for that
Healthcare providers are increasingly using AI not just to automate, but to understand. Speech and text analytics, for example, can now turn conversations into insight-rich transcripts with sentiment analysis and context. Along with AI-powered topic spotting, this helps to identify the root cause of why a patient is reaching out to a healthcare provider.
Such insight can help providers be better prepared with meaningful solutions and actions when patients get in touch – but this is just the beginning. The next evolution is how those insights drive action. AI and automation together can guide patient conversations, surface relevant information at critical moments and handle routine tasks so that administrative teams are empowered to provide the personal touch during patient engagements.
Now a new class of intelligent virtual agents is emerging based on agentic AI capable of acting with greater autonomy and reason in context, giving rise to the potential for personal care concierges that curate patients’ journeys. These virtual concierges will be able to handle more complex inbound queries, help with scheduling after hours or flag phrases like ‘chest pain’ on a call so staff can act quickly and appropriately.
Acting as virtual personal care concierges, they can autonomously interpret intent, anticipate needs and coordinate next best actions across systems and teams. They can help healthcare organisations to progress beyond isolated automation toward continuous, empathetic engagement, setting the stage for greater empathy through orchestration.
Greater empathy through orchestration
Agentic AI will become foundational to modern patient engagement, enabling healthcare organisations to deliver always-on experiences that feel personal, proactive and human – even when they’re digital. Across industries, autonomous AI agents have the potential to transform service delivery by orchestrating complex enterprise-wide interactions in real time, using contextual understanding and reasoning to achieve the best outcomes.
For healthcare providers, this shift unlocks a new level of empathy. Rather than simply automating tasks, AI can augment clinical and non-clinical teams, optimise workflows and personalise every touchpoint. Agentic systems will expand by making it possible to continuously interpret patient intent, surface relevant insights and act within ethical and clinical guardrails to ensure the right support reaches the right person at the right time.
This is what we at Genesys refer to as experience orchestration: dynamic coordination of people, systems and data to create connected emotionally intelligent experience across the entire journey. Experience orchestration goes beyond traditional automation by embedding empathy into every engagement. It uses real-time data and predictive insights to adapt to changing patient needs, guiding both digital and human interactions toward better outcomes.
A platform-based approach to patient care
In the healthcare context, experience orchestration means helping to ensure the patient journey is smooth, seamless, personalised and pre-emptive, with knowledge of patient intent so that teams can proactively assist patients in the most appropriate and effective ways possible.
This is where a platform approach to patient engagement becomes essential – or the ability to unify engagement, operations and data. Moving beyond traditional contact centre systems to modern experience orchestration platforms can enable seamless integration with existing clinical and administrative systems, breaking down silos between front- and back-office functions. This makes it possible for AI agents, human teams and supporting technologies to work in harmony, resulting in improved accuracy, safety and responsiveness while freeing staff to focus on meaningful human connection.
By bringing together real-time customer interaction data engagement history and advanced support, experience orchestration platforms bring new levels of capability to organisations. This includes enabling AI agents to work more autonomously across systems in harmony with other AI agents and humans to make customer interactions faster, safer and, more personalised
A clinician might see it in reduced administrative burden. A patient might experience it as a smoother, more intuitive journey, from scheduling and follow-up to billing and proactive outreach. When AI manages repetitive workflows, highlights risks or flags anomalies in real time, it gives caregivers the bandwidth to focus on empathy and care delivery.
Transforming healthcare, one touchpoint at a time
Today, empathetic healthcare doesn’t come from humans alone, it comes from empowering them with more insights and assisting them with AI. By deploying AI that automates routine interactions, augments human decision-making and optimises operational flow, healthcare teams gain more capacity to listen, connect and care at scale.
Tomorrow’s AI care concierges will act as orchestrators of the entire health experience by anticipating patient needs, coordinating actions across systems and partners and maintaining context across touchpoints. They’ll help ensure care journeys are continuous, personalised and secure, with governance frameworks that maintain trust and compliance.
Healthcare has long used innovation to improve clinical outcomes. The next frontier is using innovation to transform patient experiences. With responsible, agentic AI powering experience orchestration, healthcare organisations can move beyond reactive service toward proactive, connected care enabling empathy not just as an intention, but as a system capability.
As noted by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, Australia’s health sector has a long history of using innovative technologies to improve health care delivery. This should extend to the administrative work that supports clinical services. If we use innovative technologies to transform patient engagement, we can improve healthcare journeys for all Australians.
