Australia has made significant progress in digitising healthcare. Investments in electronic medical records, interoperability and information sharing have laid the foundation for a more seamless health system. Yet for many patients and clinicians, healthcare can still feel anything but connected.
Patients often move between providers, departments and digital channels without a clear sense of what comes next. They repeat information, wait for referrals to progress and navigate fragmented communication throughout their care journey. Behind the scenes, healthcare teams spend valuable time coordinating appointments, updating multiple systems and managing administrative processes that exist between episodes of care.
The challenge is no longer simply connecting information. It’s coordinating everything that happens after information becomes available.
As demand for healthcare grows, workforces will remain under pressure and patient expectations will continue to evolve. The next phase of digital health will depend on how effectively organisations can connect people, processes and technology to deliver more coordinated care.
Digital foundations are only the beginning
For more than a decade, healthcare has focused on improving interoperability and ensuring information can move more easily between systems. That progress was essential to creating better visibility across patient records and reducing many of the information silos that once slowed care.
But information alone doesn’t coordinate patient journeys.
A referral may still require multiple manual hand-offs before an appointment is confirmed. Administrative teams often move between scheduling platforms, clinical systems and communication tools to keep care progressing. Patients may still need to contact multiple departments to understand where they are in the process.
The next opportunity for digital health is to make sure information leads to coordinated action across the patient journey. Rather than viewing every interaction as a separate event, experience orchestration helps connect the people, systems, workflows and data involved in delivering care so that context moves with the patient instead of remaining isolated within individual departments.
AI becomes more valuable when it executes work
Much of today’s AI helps people retrieve information, answer questions or generate content.
Powered by Large Action Models, agentic AI will soon be capable of completing the administrative work that connects different parts of the patient journey.
Consider a patient whose specialist appointment needs to be rescheduled. Instead of requiring staff to manually update multiple systems and communicate changes across teams, an AI agent could verify appointment availability, coordinate scheduling, update relevant systems and send patient communications while escalating anything requiring clinical judgement to the appropriate healthcare professional.
Agentic AI agents can understand intent, determine appropriate next steps and execute routine administrative processes across multiple systems within clearly defined organisational guardrails.
Over time, thousands of specialised AI agents may coordinate different aspects of the patient journey – from referrals and scheduling through to follow-up communications—while sharing context across every stage.
The objective for healthcare organisations is to enable a new operating model through agentic experience orchestration.
Ultimately, this will create a more connected patient experience that reduces unnecessary administration while allowing clinicians to focus on the work only they can do.
Governance that reflects clinical risk
Healthcare has always adopted new technology thoughtfully and agentic capabilities should be no exception. As AI becomes capable of coordinating increasingly complex administrative workflows, governance must be embedded by design, not added later.
Not every application carries the same level of risk.
A practical starting point is understanding what decisions AI is influencing. Administrative activities such as referrals, appointment scheduling and patient communications require robust privacy controls, transparent guardrails and operational oversight. Applications that influence diagnosis or treatment demand significantly higher levels of validation, clinical governance and human involvement.
Matching governance to the level of risk allows healthcare organisations to improve operational efficiency today while continuing to evaluate more complex clinical applications carefully.
Australia’s evolving regulatory environment, including the establishment of the Australian Government’s new Office of AI, provides organisations with clearer guidance for adopting AI responsibly while maintaining trust.
From connected systems to connected care
Australia has already invested heavily in the digital foundations of healthcare. The next opportunity is ensuring those investments work together to create more connected experiences for patients and more sustainable ways of working for healthcare professionals.
Organisations that begin connecting workflows, improving data quality and reducing administrative friction today will be better positioned to adopt increasingly capable AI tomorrow.
The promise of digital health has never been about technology alone. It’s about making care easier to navigate for patients and giving healthcare professionals more time to focus on the moments where their expertise matters most.
Viewpoint articles are the author’s opinion, produced without payment or sponsorship.
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