Helping healthcare move from data to agentic action

For decades, healthcare has chased the "Triple Aim": better care, better health, and lower costs. And while the industry successfully digitized, it may have merely traded paper files for a mountain of data that is even harder to navigate, largely because that information remains trapped in disconnected, siloed systems.

Now, at HIMSS 2026, we are moving beyond static digital records into the agentic healthcare era. This is a fundamental shift from "point-and-click" software to anticipatory care. In this new reality, healthcare is no longer a maze of administrative hurdles, but a continuous, supported journey where the system works as hard as the people within it.

Imagine a world where clinical insights find the doctor at the exact moment of care, letting the stethoscope — not the screen — remain the center of the exam room. Picture AI agents managing the "middle office," autonomously handling claims and scheduling so that human talent can be redirected to high-touch, empathetic support. By using Google Cloud’s integrated AI stack, many of these scenarios are now possible — and our customers and partners are building a future where healthcare feels like a conversation rather than a chore.

Building the foundation with Vertex AI and Gemini

The shift to AI agents in healthcare requires an enterprise-grade ecosystem. Google Cloud’s Vertex AI platform serves as the command center for this work, allowing organizations to build and scale custom agents with clinical-grade precision. At the heart of these agents are our Gemini models. Because they are multimodal, Gemini models can understand the world much like a clinician does — processing text from medical records, voice from patient calls, and visual data from scans simultaneously.

The benefit: This allows developers and clinical IT teams to build tools that understand the full context of a patient's story, reducing the need for manual data entry and helping clinicians get the right information exactly when they need it.

To help organizations bring these agentic capabilities to life, we recently introduced:

• Gemini Enterprise: A specialized workspace where care teams deploy AI agents that can automate high-volume administrative tasks, such as summarizing complex charts and drafting documentation. These agents are grounded in your organization’s specific clinical data to provide accurate, cited answers within a secure, enterprise-grade interface. 

• Gemini Enterprise for Customer Experience (CX): A unified, agentic AI solution that improves patient and member services across call centers and other customer experiences. It brings conversational AI and automated task execution into a single, context-aware interface. This allows healthcare organizations to move beyond siloed chatbots to proactive agents that can act as intelligent support to care teams. 

Security, privacy, and compliance by design: Underpinning these innovations is Google Cloud’s "secure-by-default" infrastructure, engineered to meet the stringent requirements of the healthcare industry. While Gemini models process vast amounts of data, your clinical and patient data remains yours — it is never used to train Google’s foundation models. 

Our platform is also built to support HIPAA compliance, GDPR, and SOC 2, providing robust data residency controls and enterprise-grade encryption. By integrating with the Cloud Healthcare API and Vertex AI’s built-in governance tools, AI agents operate within a "walled garden" of healthcare organizations’ verified data. This allows healthcare organizations to innovate at the speed of AI while maintaining the highest standards of patient privacy and regulatory, audit-ready transparency.

CVS Health: Launching Health100

CVS Health is launching Health100. This new AI-native consumer engagement platform was developed using Google Cloud technology. Powered by Gemini multimodal AI and Cloud Healthcare APIs, Health100 is designed to give consumers an always-on personal health care partner that:

• Enables consumers to own their health care records and decisions
• Gives them expanded access to better care
• Saves them time and money
• Provides proactive and real-time support to stay on track to better health 

Health100 is designed to be a fully integrated and omni-channel healthcare engagement platform for consumers regardless of which pharmacy, insurance or drug benefits provider, or doctor they use. 

Highmark Health: Scaling impact with Sidekick

Another excellent example of an agentic healthcare organization is Highmark Health. The leading health system, based in Pittsburgh, Penn., is serving as a blueprint for how a large-scale health organization can move from AI experimentation to enterprise-wide transformation. Highmark’s generative AI assistant, Sidekick, has evolved from a secure "AI easy button" for employees into a powerhouse of productivity.

In just over a year, Sidekick’s volume of interactions has surged from 1 million to more than 6 million prompts. This momentum is backed by 74 active use cases — an increase of 31 from the prior year — delivering a calculated $27.9 million in AI-enabled value for Highmark in 2025 alone.

Highmark is now moving beyond simple chat interfaces to sophisticated, agent-driven features, including:

• Synthetic audience: By bypassing traditional, slow-moving surveys and focus groups, Highmark can now gain rapid, data-driven insights to refine its strategy in real time.

• AI search proxy: To empower application teams, Highmark built a lightweight service layer that allows internal apps to use Vertex AI Search. This enables teams to quickly ingest datasets into compatible datastores and query them flexibly via APIs or SDKs, removing the need for manual user interface tools.

• AHN IRB protocol & consent builder: Specifically for the Allegheny Health Network (AHN) which is part of Highmark Health, this Sidekick-based guided workflow automates the first draft of complex research protocols. By reducing manual effort and improving consistency, Highmark is allowing researchers to focus on scientific discovery rather than administrative paperwork.

• Collaborative workbooks: These workbooks will allow teams to share information and co-build tools easily, from small departmental projects to enterprise-wide initiatives, while maintaining strict healthcare governance.

• Grounding with Google Search: Sidekick now integrates real-time information for fact verification and research, ensuring that users have access to the most current data available for clinical and operational decision-making.

The benefit: For Highmark’s workforce, these tools transform AI from a standalone utility into a collaborative partner. Whether it's simulating a focus group in seconds or automating a research protocol, Highmark is proving that when you lower the barrier to AI adoption, you unlock massive financial and operational value.

Waystar: Advancing the autonomous revenue cycle

Waystar is a leading provider of an AI-powered healthcare revenue cycle platform that has spent the past decade harnessing the power of AI to alleviate the burden of administrative waste for healthcare providers.

Waystar announced an expanded collaboration with Google Cloud to accelerate agentic AI capabilities and advance the healthcare industry toward an autonomous revenue cycle. By integrating Waystar's financial and clinical data — informed by billions of transactions and one-third of all patient discharges in the United States — with Google's hyperscale infrastructure, Waystar delivers mission-critical intelligence that operates as a system of action, optimizing the entire claim lifecycle while improving patient experiences.

The benefit: Since launching Waystar AltitudeAI, Waystar has helped providers prevent more than $15 billion in denied claims. Additionally, clients have reduced time spent on appeal and documentation workflows by 90%. For hospital administrators, these innovations remove the daily frustration of manual claim corrections, working preventable denials, and massive resource drain to reallocate to care; for patients, it reduces surprise bills by ensuring their financial experience is transparent, fast, and accurate.

Humana: Redefining the member experience

Humana is proving that AI can radically enhance the human touch. Its new Agent Assist solution, built on Humana’s agentic AI platform using Gemini Enterprise for Customer Experience (CX), supports more than 20,000 member advocates who handle up to 80 million calls annually. By keeping a "human in the loop," Humana ensures that technology operates in the background to enhance service quality while advocates remain accountable for every member interaction.

The benefit: For Humana’s member advocates, the agent handles the heavy lifting by summarizing conversations in real time and surfacing relevant benefit details and proactive guidance. This reduces the manual workload and allows the advocate to stay emotionally present and fully engaged with the member on the phone, ensuring members feel heard and supported with faster, more personalized, and accurate answers during what is often a stressful moment.

Quest Diagnostics: The Quest AI Companion

Quest Diagnostics is transforming how patients interact with lab results data through the Quest AI Companion. Powered by Gemini, this new chat feature within the free MyQuest app bridges the gap between a complex lab report and patient understanding. Instead of staring at a list of biomarkers and reference ranges, patients can receive a clear, plain-language explanation of their results.

The benefit: For the patient, this turns a moment of potential confusion into one of clarity and empowerment. By synthesizing five years of health trends into a cohesive narrative, the agent prepares patients to walk into their next appointment with a targeted list of meaningful questions. This shifts the doctor-patient relationship from one of data-gathering to one of shared decision-making, ensuring that laboratory insights lead directly to informed clinical action.

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The stories we are sharing at HIMSS this year show how agentic AI can lead to real results. Whether it is CVS Health reimagining the consumer journey or Humana empowering its workforce, the message is clear: AI agents are here to help build a healthier, simpler, and more connected healthcare industry.

Visit our Google Cloud Press Corner to learn more about our latest announcements, or stop by the Google booth at HIMSS 2026, #3507. You can also read more about Google Cloud’s view on AI trends in healthcare in our AI Agent Trends 2026 report.