By Andreea Pleşea, PhD, Co-Founder and COO, Druid AI
UK healthcare providers have made good progress in helping patients access digital services. The bigger challenge is helping them complete their journey once they have entered a system. Patient portals, online booking systems, virtual consultations, digital triage tools and self-service applications have all focused on making healthcare more accessible, efficient and convenient.
How quickly can a patient find the information they need? How easily can they book an appointment? How many enquiries can be handled digitally?
These are important measures, but many healthcare providers still face challenges in helping patients complete journeys across fragmented systems and services.
What ultimately matters is whether patients can successfully move through the entire journey in a coordinated and consistent way. From referral to consultation, from diagnosis to treatment, or from discharge to follow-up, major challenges remain in reducing friction across patient journeys.
The consequences of a fragmented journey can be felt across the board. Patients become frustrated; clinical and administrative teams spend time responding to avoidable enquiries; contact volumes increase; appointments are missed; and care pathways become harder to navigate.
The risk is that organisations continue investing in additional technology without resolving the underlying operational friction.
The conversation around AI in UK healthcare needs to change
The sector’s recent focus on adopting AI has often centred on how it can be used to answer questions faster. Generative AI tools can certainly improve access to information, summarise content, assist staff and help patients find answers more quickly — but answering questions is not the same as completing a patient journey.
A patient wanting an update on whether their referral has been received is not looking for generic information — they are looking for reassurance. A patient calling to check the status of an appointment or test result is not simply seeking a better experience with a chatbot — they want visibility on their case and certainty about what happens next.
This is where AI agents have the potential to create significantly more value than traditional automation or standalone AI tools.
When appropriately integrated and configured, AI agents can operate across multiple systems and workflows. They can help verify information, coordinate tasks, trigger permitted actions and move administrative processes forward.
For example, a patient referral journey may involve scheduling systems, electronic patient records, communication platforms and administrative workflows. Traditionally, individual steps may require manual intervention or create delays while information is located or transferred. An AI agent can help orchestrate activities across authorised systems and workflows, identify missing information, support proactive patient updates and reduce the number of interactions required to progress the journey.
Any deployment involving patient data or healthcare workflows must also be designed around appropriate information governance, security, access controls, human oversight and applicable clinical-safety requirements.
AI should remove friction
Healthcare should remain fundamentally dependent on human expertise, empathy and clinical judgement. The role of AI in UK healthcare should be to remove procedural and administrative friction that prevents healthcare professionals from focusing on higher-value patient care and activities.
This is becoming increasingly important as healthcare providers face pressure to improve productivity while maintaining quality of care.
Research from the King’s Fund has highlighted how fragmented digital systems can interrupt workflows and force healthcare staff to duplicate tasks, while also making the case for digital technology that supports productivity and better coordinated care. Likewise, NHS England’s transformation programmes continue to emphasise improving patient experience, productivity and efficiency, alongside more coordinated use of digital technology.
The issue is that many AI initiatives still begin with the technology to be adopted rather than the outcomes that need to be achieved.
Recent AI deployment data from Druid AI’s AI Adoption Benchmark indicates that production AI activity often concentrates around a relatively small number of recurring, high-volume workflows. This matters because the greatest practical value of AI agent deployments may come from improving the journeys that patients and employees encounter every day.
Rather than introducing AI simply because the technology is available, healthcare providers can start with the points where patients or staff repeatedly encounter delays, duplicated work or unnecessary interactions and assess whether AI can remove some of that friction.
Access remains important, but on its own is not enough
The success of adopting agentic AI or AI agents in UK healthcare will be determined by whether the technology helps patients complete their journeys more easily, enables staff to navigate processes more efficiently and allows healthcare providers to deliver more coordinated services without adding unnecessary complexity.
That requires more than connecting an AI model to existing systems. Healthcare organisations need to consider governance, integration, security and human oversight alongside the patient and operational outcomes they are trying to achieve. AI should support healthcare professionals and administrative teams, not create another disconnected layer for them to manage.
The UK healthcare providers that see the greatest return from AI agents are likely to be those that focus on patient journey completion rather than entry points, on outcomes rather than interactions, and on connecting fragmented journeys rather than creating more digital front doors.
Digital access remains essential. But access is only the beginning of the patient journey. The greater opportunity for AI is to help healthcare organisations connect what happens next — reducing unnecessary friction, supporting staff and making complex healthcare processes easier for patients to navigate.
