More care for all: Expanding national healthcare with agentic AI

Nationalized health systems are charged with providing high-quality healthcare to an entire population. To do so, they must overcome a host of common challenges, including clinician scarcity, escalating costs, and geographic barriers to care. Two governments on opposite sides of the globe have been charting a path toward healthcare transformation that reaches more patients with better care using advanced telemedicine and agentic AI.

Saudi Arabia’s Seha Virtual Hospital is the largest virtual hospital in the world, delivering 16 million virtual appointments and consultations in 2025. El Salvador is building a sustainable healthcare infrastructure guaranteeing free access to medical care and raising the quality of care for all Salvadorans.

Both approaches harness agentic AI and centralized healthcare data. And what they’re each building, independently and simultaneously, is a health system that uses data to improve the patient experience, and ultimately, care outcomes.

Together, these two initiatives offer a practical blueprint for what any nationalized health system can achieve, regardless of geography or GDP.

Expanding access and improving care

El Salvador had an acute access problem with too few physicians and medical facilities to equitably serve the entire population. A highly advanced telemedicine platform, DoctorSV, is closing the gap.

DoctorSV reaches Salvadorans from urban centers to hard-to-reach rural communities, bringing a full set of clinical tools together in a single architecture built on Google Cloud. It supports interoperable digital medical records, AI-assisted triage, and electronic prescriptions, and connects to laboratories, pharmacies, and imaging. More than 2.3 million citizens have already used the platform, achieving a 97% satisfaction rating.

In Saudi Arabia, citizens faced a highly fragmented healthcare system with disconnected medical services and patient records. The Kingdom went all-in on Sehhaty, a new digital health platform, during COVID-19 and 88% of the population has already used it to conduct teleconsultations, manage prescriptions, view health records, and more.

See how Seattle Children's supports clinicians with AI.

Building on this success, the Kingdom introduced a Gemini-powered AI Health Coach offering a fully conversational, multimodal experience through live voice and video, providing personalized health guidance drawn from each citizen's own health history. When citizens have questions, agents act on their behalf to find helpful information and complete tasks.

To improve healthcare, health systems need to do more than provide digital access and a faster intake process. Improving citizen health requires restructuring care delivery and rethinking how the system engages patients.

Getting clinicians back to their patients

Restructuring care delivery begins with the care encounter itself. In both countries, clinicians face the same compounding pressure: high patient volumes, complex documentation requirements, and a shortage of available specialists. Every hour spent on administrative tasks is an hour not spent with patients. Over time, this deficit drives burnout and reduces capacity.

In Saudi Arabia, Gemini runs in the background during patient appointments, transcribing conversations in real time. When the appointment ends, the physician can request a summary of key clinical points, relevant history, and recommended next steps. Sehhaty has recorded over 40 million vital sign readings and radiology departments using the system reported an 87% reduction in report writing time.

In El Salvador, DoctorSV’s AI acts as a real-time medical scribe during appointments. Powered by Gemini, the platform's diagnostic assistant generates diagnoses integrated with the patient's history, suggests treatment plans, and alerts providers to high clinical risks. The platform integrates an imaging storage and access system that allows physicians to view X-rays, ultrasounds, and CT scans directly during the virtual consultation without needing to transfer physical results.

In both countries, agentic AI helps physicians be fully present in patient encounters.

From reactive care to prevention

Improving citizen health also requires a system that stays engaged with citizens between visits by anticipating risk, prompting action, and intervening before a condition becomes a crisis.

Saudi Arabia is developing proactive outreach strategies for citizens with chronic conditions, including reminders and nudges based on the patient’s health data. Instead of a patient spending hours researching available care options based on their conditions, they’ll receive recommended care strategies and resources.

In El Salvador, DoctorSV anticipates when patients may need follow-up, automatically generating study bundles 30 days before future appointments and issuing proactive clinical alerts. Clinical data flows into a Healthcare Data Engine based on HL7 FHIR standards, ensuring that each patient's record is securely accessible across all points of care.

The shift from reactive treatment to proactive prevention has long been a stated ambition of nationalized health systems. With the right data infrastructure in place and AI mature enough to act on it, health systems can now engage citizens in their own health before they arrive sick. What was long treated as aspirational is now achievable.

Building intelligent care at national scale

Deploying any technology within a health system requires strict adherence to patient privacy, data sovereignty requirements, and regulatory frameworks.

In El Salvador, the platform operates with the highest standards of clinical data protection. Google Cloud ensures all data is encrypted in transit and at rest and complies with international interoperability standards like HL7 FHIR. In Saudi Arabia, all patient data remains inside the Kingdom under the Ministry of Health's direct control, with infrastructure designed to meet strict data residency requirements.

In both cases, our technology teams and partners work alongside national health authorities to build compliant and secure infrastructure and solutions.

The challenges these two countries are solving are not unique to them. Every nationalized health system is navigating some version of the same terrain: citizens who need more than a digital portal, clinicians who need more than a faster filing system, and populations that deserve a health system working proactively on their behalf. The path from digital access to intelligent care is navigable. If your health system is ready, we'd like to help you build it.