603 - Transforming Patient Experience with Agentic AI: Reducing Administrative Burden at HIMSS26

In this episode of Talking Health Tech, host Peter Birch sits down with Dr. Roland Elling, Chief Medical Officer at Amazon Web Services (AWS), to explore how agentic AI is transforming patient experience and reducing administrative burden in healthcare. Elling explains AWS’s pivotal role not just as a cloud infrastructure provider, but as a direct enabler of healthcare innovation through specialized services like AWS Health Lake, Health Imaging, and Healthomics—tools that standardize and streamline the handling of clinical text, imaging, and genomic data. The conversation dives into the launch of Amazon Connect Health, a suite of AI agents designed to automate patient identification, scheduling, clinical documentation summarization, ambient voice capture, and medical coding—tasks that currently consume up to 80% of a clinician’s pre-appointment time. By offloading these burdens, clinicians can focus more on patient interaction, improving care quality and reducing burnout. Elling emphasizes that AI is not replacing clinicians but enabling them to be more human-centered, with real-world examples from the University of San Diego and Australia’s Health Direct showing dramatic efficiency gains and patient diversion from emergency departments. The episode concludes with strategic advice for health systems: start with pain points, prioritize data infrastructure, and adopt AI with top-down leadership and user education. Key takeaways include: 1) AI agents can automate high-volume, low-risk administrative tasks, freeing clinicians for patient care; 2) Standardized data platforms like FHIR and AWS Health Lake are foundational for interoperability and AI success; 3) Patient trust and transparency are critical—AI should enhance, not replace, human interaction; 4) Success requires both strategic vision (CEO-led AI transformation) and tactical execution (identifying and solving specific workflow bottlenecks); 5) The future of healthcare tech is not standalone AI tools, but integrated, modular components that empower builders to innovate faster and more securely.