What You Should Know
- The Paradigm Shift: At HIMSS 2026, Google Cloud officially signaled the end of the “point-and-click” software era in healthcare, ushering in the age of “agentic AI”—systems that autonomously execute complex, multi-step workflows.
- The Infrastructure: These capabilities are powered by Vertex AI and the multimodal Gemini models, operating within a secure, HIPAA-compliant “walled garden” that ensures patient data is never used to train Google’s foundation models.
- CVS Health’s Health100: CVS is launching an open, AI-native consumer engagement platform called Health100, designed to provide proactive health interventions and connect users to pharmacist-led care, regardless of their insurance provider.
- Massive Hard ROI: Highmark Health expanded its generative AI assistant, Sidekick, delivering a calculated $27.9M in AI-enabled value in 2025 alone. Similarly, revenue cycle giant Waystar utilized Google Cloud’s AI to prevent more than $15 billion in denied claims.
- Consumer & Member Experience: Humana is deploying Agent Assist to its 20,000 member advocates to summarize calls in real-time, while Quest Diagnostics launched the Quest AI Companion to translate complex lab results into plain language for patients.
The Multimodal Advantage
To understand why agentic AI is suddenly viable in healthcare, you have to look at the underlying architecture. Google’s Gemini models are natively multimodal. They do not just read text; they can process text from an Electronic Health Record (EHR), analyze voice transcripts from a patient call, and evaluate visual data from a scan simultaneously.
By operating within Google Cloud’s “secure-by-default,” HIPAA-compliant infrastructure, these agents function in a walled garden. This allows organizations to deploy powerful AI without compromising data residency or feeding proprietary clinical data back into public foundation models.
From Ecosystems to Autonomous Revenue
The announcements at HIMSS prove that agentic AI is no longer trapped in pilot purgatory; it is operating at hyperscale.
CVS Health is making an ambitious consumer play with the launch of Health100. Backed by Gemini, this tech-enabled subsidiary is building an open, AI-native consumer engagement platform. Unlike traditional payer apps, Health100 is designed to ingest data from wearables and health records to provide real-time, proactive support—essentially functioning as an always-on personal healthcare partner that eliminates the “homework” of navigating the medical system.
On the provider operations side, the numbers are staggering. Highmark Health has scaled its internal generative AI assistant, Sidekick, to handle over 6 million prompts across 74 active use cases. By automating research protocols, creating synthetic focus groups, and serving as an AI search proxy, Sidekick delivered an estimated $27.9 million in value in 2025 alone.
Similarly, Waystar is using Google’s infrastructure to pioneer the autonomous revenue cycle. By embedding agentic AI directly into the claims lifecycle, Waystar AltitudeAI has already prevented more than $15 billion in denied claims in less than a year, reducing the time spent on denial appeals by 90%.
Restoring the Human Element
Ironically, the ultimate goal of deploying artificial intelligence in healthcare is to make the experience more human.
– Humana is demonstrating this by deploying Agent Assist to its 20,000 member advocates. Handling 80 million calls annually, these advocates previously spent the majority of their time frantically searching through policy documents. Now, the AI summarizes the conversation in real-time and surfaces the exact benefit details needed, allowing the human advocate to actually listen to and empathize with the caller.
– Quest Diagnostics is applying a similar philosophy directly to the patient. Their new Quest AI Companion, integrated into the MyQuest app, allows patients to chat with their lab results. Instead of staring blankly at a high lipid panel, the patient receives a plain-language explanation of their biomarkers and a suggested list of questions to ask their doctor.
