The news: Amazon Web Services (AWS) launched Amazon Connect Health, an agentic AI-powered solution aimed at reducing providers’ administrative burden and helping patients navigate care more efficiently.

Here’s how it works: Amazon Connect Health integrates with providers’ electronic health record (EHR) systems to help both doctors and administrative staff with patient verification, appointment management, medical history reviews, and clinical documentation.

• When a patient calls to schedule care, AWS’ agentic AI verifies their identity, checks insurance, reviews availability, and books the appointment in real time.
• The agentic AI analyzes a patient’s medical history to provide clinicians with upfront insight into the reason for the visit.
• During appointments, with a patient’s permission, the solution transcribes the doctor-patient conversation, generating medical codes clinicians need for billing.

Why it matters: While a range of AI scribes alleviate physicians' note-taking burden in the exam room, Amazon Connect Health also targets a separate operational bottleneck: the logistical complexity of the healthcare call center.

• Call centers schedule appointments, coordinate referrals, and help patients navigate insurance issues. Often, the process results in long hold times, frustrated patients, and unresolved issues caused by endless back-and-forth calls.
• Health system staff spend up to 80% of call time on manual data compilation across fragmented tools, per AWS data.
• AWS said health system customer UC San Diego Health reduced call abandonment rates by 30% to 60% using its agentic AI.

Implications for tech companies selling to healthcare providers: Health systems are aggressively pivoting toward agentic AI with big cost-saving expectations, meaning tech companies will be pressured to deliver clear ROI.

• 85% of health system and health plan executives plan to boost agentic AI spending in the next few years, and roughly 60% of early agentic AI adopters expect cost savings exceeding 20% over that period, per a recent Deloitte survey.
• Amazon hopes its tech credibility will help it win over healthcare organization customers, but it may struggle to lure physicians away from agentic solutions developed by familiar EHR vendors like Epic.