Agentforce for Healthcare and Life Sciences (HLS): Use Cases and Recommendations

Author: Janet Elliott and Tony McCune

If you work in healthcare or life sciences, you’re no stranger to the pressure of staffing shortages, compliance demands, and operational or administrative headaches that drain your time — which is where Agentforce, Salesforce’s AI-powered agent framework, comes in. 

This blog will explore how Agentforce can be strategically applied to tackle those challenges and other HLS pain points, helping teams automate busywork, streamline operations, and focus more on what matters most: delivering better outcomes.

Where does this information come from? 

Kicksaw works extensively with HLS clients, including Agentforce projects, and our technical team has been exploring what’s possible with Agentforce since product launch. We want to share some of what we’ve learned to give context to how Agentforce can be applied to improve care coordination, automate repetitive tasks, and provide better data for more meaningful insights (for all of our HLS data nerds out there)  — so  keep reading to find:

• Why Agentforce makes sense, delivers value, and increases efficiencies for HLS
• Agentforce use cases for healthcare provider organizations 
• Agentforce use cases for life sciences organizations (i.e., pharma, biopharmas, CROs, CDMOs, etc.)
• Recommendations for Agentforce preparation for maximized value

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Why Agentforce Makes Sense for HLS

The answer is that Agentforce helps tackle skilled labor shortages, skill gaps, and the high-pressure environments that go hand-in-hand with HLS.

There was a recent study done by LinkedIn that covers Skills on the Rise across all industries, as well as Skills on the Rise in Healthcare. This study emphasizes the impact that the fast pace of change and accelerated advancement of technology has had universally, and specifically, the skills needed to keep up with/make the most of these challenges.

For healthcare/HLS the top ten skills on the rise listed are:

• Health Information Management
• Regulatory Compliance
• Tactical Planning
• Customer Engagement and Support
• Care Plan Development and Management
• Records Management
• Collaborative Problem Solving
• Conflict Management
• Employee Communications
• Clinical Management

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In a surprise to no one, those are all things we’re often asked for help with by HLS organizations, which can also be addressed with Agentforce use.

Agentforce AI agents — both internal and external-facing — provide contextual problem-solving support (see our use case sections below for examples) that goes far beyond what typical automation tools or chatbots offer. 

• Agentforce uses set parameters (bonus: when set up correctly, these can help with things like HIPAA compliance) and its Atlas Reasoning Engine
• It uses these things to think through the prompt that the user has entered into the agent (a.k.a. helping to quickly and efficiently take on tasks/supply comprehensive information; for example, tasks or info related to the top ten skills we listed in the previous above) 
• It requires very little on the user end, making it a very flexible, adaptive, and user-friendly tool

Pair this with the Salesforce platform and other Salesforce and system capabilities, and you have an AI solution with high-value potential.

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Agentforce Use Cases for Healthcare Providers

Agentforce agents are very much “if you can dream it, you can do it.” Where our last Agentforce blog gave you a broad overview of Agentforce information (we highly recommend giving it a read for Agentforce basics and ROI tips), for this blog we’ve put together a list of industry-specific examples for both healthcare and life sciences organizations to give you an idea of what they’re able to achieve. 

Generally speaking, these use cases will leverage Agentforce + Salesforce Health Cloud or Salesforce Life Sciences Cloud, as well as other data sources and/or tools (you can give us a shout if you’d like to walk through your own use case ideas or have any questions).

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Agent Goal: Expedite patient intake 

Agent Functionality Examples: 

• Answer a patient intake resource’s questions based on standard operating procedure (SOP) and the data the agent is linked to; give recommendations when needed
• Use historical data and payment outcomes to automate insurance risk assessments; achieved with a combination of tools, including an Einstein predictability model that leverages Data Cloud and Einstein Studio
• Automate referrals and prior authorizations

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Agent Goal: Improve the efficiency of handover during resource shift changes 

Agent Functionality Example:

• Provide an opportunity summary, with key data points, record info, links, and latest activity for shift transitions; include relevant actions

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Agent Goal: Improve resource performance and patient sentiment 

Agent Functionality Examples:

• Leverage call transcripts and Agentforce to automate call review and patient sentiment scoring for recommendations
• Link (SOP) Knowledge Base to help with adherence to standards and best practices, offer prompts when needed, and easily answer questions

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Agent Goal: Reduce inbound call volume and improve care coordination

Agent Functionality Examples:

• Answer a wide variety of triage facility questions; escalate to a live person using Omni-Channel and chat functionality for complex issues, and provide information to direct patients to emergency support if needed
• Walk patients through scheduling options and information for upcoming appointments or procedures; help patients book and manage appointments

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Agentforce Use Cases for Life Sciences

‍Agent Goal: Optimize rep performance/increase sales (includes field sales functionality)

Agent Functionality Examples:

• Offer sale scripts based on patient or facility information and SOP; follow-up with actions for device orders and sample management
• Provide account summaries for upcoming visits complete with contact info, relevant product/order information, directions, etc.
• Answer client questions and provide clients with updates easily from the field
• Transcribe visit notes and automatically update relevant information in Salesforce; create new opportunities and follow-up with tailored communication using that information

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Agent Goal: Expedite benefits verification (with integrated or unintegrated systems)

Agent Functionality Example:

• Verify benefits and financial assistance options; answer questions based on SOP knowledge base and linked data sources; recommend follow-up actions or offer skill-based routing for complex concerns
• (Unintegrated) Gather missing benefit certification (BV) and prior authorization (PA) data, including plan details and PA request forms
• (Unintegrated) Enable intelligent document processing to automatically ingest responses

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Agent Goal: Improve clinical trial selection processes

Agent Functionality Example:

• Narrow down the selection process for research and development sites; match candidates for studies based on set criteria, expanding the search when needed according to priorities

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Agent Goal: Build stronger relationships with healthcare providers

Agent Functionality Examples:

• Provide assistance building networks based on set criteria; provide information and recommendations to support interactions and communication with maximum impact

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Agentforce Tips for Your HLS Organization

If any of those examples have started you thinking about potential Agentforce use for your own HLS organization, there’s a little bit of prep work and information needed to make sure you’re maximizing your ROI and solution performance.

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Define your scope and boundaries when you speak with your implementation partner:

• Keep it simple with your first agents
• Remember that tailored templates will provide the most value
• Roll out to a pilot group in a controlled setting
• Have a plan in place for tracking responses, outcomes, and metrics

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Don’t forget to prep your data (and your employees):

• Clean data = more meaningful results, so data clean up is highly recommended; you should also use a data governance framework to adhere to quality standards
• Take time to analyze which data sources you should be incorporating; sometimes this means building out a Knowledge Base
• Make sure your data is properly grounded in Salesforce’s data security model
• Consider incorporating training for relevant team members, so that they can take on basic solution ownership/maintenance/enhancements after the project is complete; bonus, it helps contribute to their career development

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Employ governance:

• Data quality is your best friend when it comes to ROI and improvements, so be sure to employ audit tracking and history
• Be sure your implementation partner is using human validation strategies to check results at set up/during testing; and getting your SMEs involved to check results at set intervals is also a good idea
• A mechanism for feedback is always needed to ensure quality 

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We offer a helpful, scope and prioritization-focused Agentforce use case workshop, so reach out if you’d like some expert guidance on how Agentforce could meet your own organization’s goals or address its pain points — whether that’s automating patient intake, streamlining communication, or improving clinical or field rep efficiency. 

These workshops are tailored to your organization’s specific needs and help you understand where to start. And, bonus, we can work with your team to get Agentforce up and running as well, to make sure you’re getting maximum benefit and value from your investment. 

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Additional Resources

If you’re interested in exploring additional HLS solution content, we’ve got you covered there as well:

• Your Guide to Agentforce: Basic Info, Use Cases, and ROI Tips‍
• Get to Know Salesforce Data Cloud: A High-Level Overview, Key Use Cases, and Value-Focused Tips‍
• Clinical Integrations for Interoperability: Manage Data, Add Organizational Value, and Improve Patient Outcomes‍
• How Kicksaw is Helping Providers Lead the Way with Next Gen Provider Referral Management (PRM)‍
• Turning Patient Engagement into Collaborative Care 

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