Thousands of patients are referred for procedures but vanish into the void because no one called them back within 48 hours.
By Shani Fargun, VP Healthcare at StackAI
Sponsored by StackAI
While the headlines at major cardiology conferences focus on AI that can read angiograms or predict arrhythmias, a quieter, unsexy revolution is happening in the back office, and it might be the key to actually using those advanced clinical tools.
The biggest bottleneck in modern cardiology is administrative friction. It’s the death by 1,000 faxes that occurs when a patient is referred for a TAVR, but the pre-op workup is trapped in a PDF from an external hospital. It’s the prior authorization that sits in a queue for weeks because a specific keyword was missing from the submission.
- According to the AMA, 94% of physicians report that these administrative hurdles lead to delays in accessing necessary care.
Healthcare has a data problem. The industry runs on unstructured data. Referral letters, handwritten call notes, faxed labs, and denial letters make up the bulk of cardiac operations.
- Nearly 80% of all healthcare data is unstructured and inaccessible to traditional automation. This forces highly trained clinical staff to spend hours acting as data entry clerks rather than treating patients.
Agentic AI is the solution. Agentic AI isn’t a chatbot or a diagnostic model, it’s a digital worker.
- Unlike traditional software that waits for a human to input data, Agentic AI can autonomously perform tasks across different systems.
- Human-in-the-loop approval steps can be added to ensure clinical oversight. Here’s a full breakdown of AI transformation for healthcare.
How can agentic workflows change modern practices?
- Patient Scheduling & Follow-Up – Agents autonomously handle the last mile of care coordination, reaching out to patients to schedule diagnostic testing, confirming procedure dates, and answering routine logistical questions without burdening clinical staff. This directly combats referral leakage, which costs health systems an estimated $971,000 per physician annually.
- Automated Prior Auth – Agents cross-reference patient charts against payer-specific guidelines to draft authorization requests that minimize technical denials. Download the free whitepaper of use cases for healthcare here.
- Referral Velocity – Agents ingest incoming faxes and emails, extract clinical criteria, and draft the patient chart for review: reducing time-to-appointment from weeks to days.
The Takeaway
The future of healthcare starts with better flows. By automating the administrative burden, we allow interventionalists to focus on what they do best: treating patients.
Request a demo to see customized use cases for your organization here.
