Agentic AI and its impact on the healthcare sector [Q&A]

Agentic AI is changing healthcare workflows by moving from passive data analysis to active orchestration of decisions.

But with this come risk. We spoke to Rajan Kohli, CEO of CitiusTech, to discuss how AI is changing healthcare and how organizations can prepare for its impact.

BN: How is agentic AI transforming diagnostics and workflows in healthcare, and why are trust and transparency key to its adoption?

RK: Agentic AI thrives in environments where input is variable, decisions are complex, and time is critical -- like ICU discharge planning, post-discharge risk assessments, and claims denial management. These aren’t tasks for traditional automation. They demand adaptability, contextual judgment, and the ability to manage a process end-to-end with minimal human supervision.

But with power comes scrutiny. Unlike rule-based AI, agentic systems act with autonomy. When a system can recommend a prognosis or prioritize patient care, the margin for error collapses to zero. This is why trust and transparency aren’t feel-good principles -- they are survival imperatives. Agentic AI must operate within auditable, explainable, and regulatory-compliant frameworks. Decisions must be logged, reviewable, and critically augment, not replace, clinical expertise.

CitiusTech integrates Task-Driven Agents (TDA) to introduce predictability and enforce human-in-the-loop governance, especially in diagnostics and prioritization workflows. These design principles bring determinism to complex automation and help demystify AI decisions for clinicians and regulators alike.

This is not about replacing physicians. It’s about giving them sharper tools -- AI agents that are transparent, reviewable, and rooted in real-world clinical logic. That’s the only way to embed trust deep into the system.

BN: As healthcare shifts to real-time, personalized care, how can agentic AI help organizations deliver more patient-centered experiences?

RK: Personalized care is no longer a vision statement -- it’s now a system requirement. But delivering it at scale demands infrastructure that can act in context, in real time, and across fragmented care journeys. Agentic AI fills this execution gap. It brings autonomy to clinical and operational workflows, making intelligent decisions on behalf of the system while adapting to each patient’s unique circumstances.

For healthcare enterprises, this unlocks a new care delivery architecture -- where AI agents assess patient status continuously, initiate actions like scheduling, education, or risk escalation, and close the loop without waiting for human triggers. CitiusTech’s deployments in post-discharge risk assessment, medication adherence, and chronic disease support demonstrate how AI agents can operate independently yet safely within clinical boundaries.

This transforms the patient experience. Instead of navigating the system, the system navigates to the patient, anticipating needs, responding to signals, and coordinating care with precision. Empathetic AI agents answer questions, monitor progress, and escalate when intervention is needed. The result is higher engagement, and more importantly, measurable improvements in adherence, safety, and outcomes.

To enable this shift, enterprises must rewire their operating models. Agentic AI requires interoperable data, clearly defined intervention protocols, and governance structures that support autonomous workflows with clinical oversight.

Patient-centered care cannot be achieved through more staff or more data alone. It requires intelligent systems capable of acting in real time, with the same consistency and sensitivity that patients expect from their best providers. Agentic AI makes that possible, at scale.

BN: How can healthcare enterprises modernize legacy systems and build scalable, ethical AI infrastructure with agentic AI as the foundation?

RK: Modernizing healthcare infrastructure requires more than digitizing analog processes. It demands a structural shift. One that integrates intelligence, accountability, and adaptability into every layer of the enterprise. Agentic AI provides the architectural blueprint for this transformation. It enables systems that don’t just store or display data, but that actively orchestrate decisions, adapt to evolving inputs, and comply with ethical and regulatory boundaries by design.

But this cannot be layered over fragmented, legacy systems. Healthcare organizations must first invest in foundational capabilities: data convergence, real-time interoperability, and AI-native pipelines that can power dynamic decision-making across clinical, operational, and financial functions. CitiusTech’s work with leading payers and providers involves building this backbone -- modern data architectures, HITRUST-compliant platforms, and integration frameworks that unlock value across siloed datasets.

Scalability and ethical AI cannot be decoupled. Agentic AI introduces autonomous behavior, which raises the bar on governance. Explainability, auditability, and human-in-the-loop oversight must be engineered upfront, not retrofitted. CitiusTech ensures that every agentic AI deployment includes embedded logging, traceability, bias monitoring, and role-based controls. This allows enterprises to scale automation without compromising safety or trust.
Critically, modernization isn’t a rip-and-replace exercise. It’s a strategic layering of intelligence over existing assets. Agentic AI agents can co-exist with current EHRs, CRMs, and claims systems -- pulling data, initiating workflows, and driving results autonomously. This makes transformation capital-efficient and disruption-proof.

Agentic AI is not just a tool -- it’s a shift in system behavior. When embedded into core infrastructure, it enables a healthcare enterprise to become more adaptive, proactive, and accountable. At scale.

BN: Beyond platforms and tools, how should healthcare organizations rethink people, processes, and business models to unlock the full potential of agentic AI?

RK: Agentic AI redefines how organizations must think. It moves healthcare from a world of static workflows and episodic interventions to one driven by autonomous, goal-oriented agents that act in context and in real time. Unlocking its full potential requires a systemic reorientation of people, processes, and business models.

First, the workforce model must evolve. Agentic AI handles routine, multi-step processes -- like eligibility checks, claims support, or post-discharge assessments -- freeing up clinical and operational staff for higher-order decision-making. This demands not just reskilling but role redesign: clinicians become supervisors of AI-driven workflows, knowledge workers shift from execution to orchestration, and AI governance teams gain prominence within the enterprise.

Second, the operating model must embrace decentralization. Traditional healthcare workflows are rigid and centralized. Agentic systems thrive in distributed environments, operating asynchronously across care settings, departments, and systems. Processes must be rearchitected to support agentic autonomy, with clear escalation paths, auditability, and seamless collaboration across human and digital actors.

Third, the business model must shift from volume to value, and from services to outcomes. Agentic AI enables longitudinal, precision-driven care at lower marginal cost, aligning perfectly with value-based care models. It turns previously unscalable functions, like personalized follow-ups or education, into system-wide capabilities, allowing organizations to monetize intelligence instead of capacity.

The transition is both technological and organizational. Agentic AI challenges leadership to rewire the enterprise around dynamic, intelligent execution. That means rethinking talent strategy, decentralizing process control, and aligning incentives to AI-augmented performance. The organizations that do this will lead the next phase of healthcare, not as digital adopters, but as autonomous, learning ecosystems.

BN: Looking five years ahead, where will AI and automation drive the biggest changes in healthcare, and what should enterprises focus on now to prepare?

RK: Over the next five years, AI will redefine the structural core of healthcare, not by marginally improving processes, but by reconstructing how care is delivered, governed, and scaled. The biggest shifts will come from three interlocking capabilities: autonomous workflows, real-time intelligence, and system-wide personalization.

Agentic AI will be at the center of this transformation. Its ability to plan, decide, and act across distributed systems positions it as the execution layer for everything from post-acute care and chronic disease management to payer workflows and life sciences R&D. It will become integral to delivering timely interventions, coordinating multi-specialty teams, and driving outcomes at scale.

To prepare, enterprises must start with data infrastructure. Most AI failures trace back to fragmented, inaccessible, or ungoverned data. Building AI-native data platforms -- with interoperability, auditability, and real-time ingestion -- is the foundation. Without this, agentic systems will underperform or act unpredictably.

Second, invest in operational maturity. Agentic AI introduces a different risk profile -- it’s not just about prediction accuracy but about autonomous action. This requires robust governance frameworks, bias mitigation protocols, and clear HITL (human-in-the-loop) boundaries from day one.

Finally, shift the mindset from cost-cutting to capability-building. Agentic AI doesn’t just optimize -- it expands what’s possible. It enables 24/7 engagement, adaptive workflows, and continuous learning systems. Enterprises that approach AI as a strategic capability, not a project, will lead in care quality, efficiency, and innovation.

The winners will be the most deliberate architects of intelligence. Now is the time to build the foundation that autonomous systems will run on tomorrow.

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