How AI Personas enable patient-centric healthcare

Healthcare in 2025 is transforming.

Driven by a demand for more accessible, efficient, and equitable care, providers and developers are searching for more avenues to provide more patient-centric approaches. After the pandemic defined the early 2020s and the mass adoption of telehealth, providers look to embrace more immersive technologies. Patients now expect on-demand conversations with their healthcare providers.

This closely mirrors the experiences and convenience they get everywhere else in life – Zoom meetings, movie streaming, music subscriptions, even a private taxi for their burrito. Healthcare has turned to video agents—emotive, interactive, photorealistic avatars—to meet the demands of patients and expand the reach of care without compromising their needs.

Healthcare has taken a battering

You’ve heard the war stories of providers and practitioners on the frontlines of COVID-19 — the amount of stress led to over 100,000 nurses leaving within 3 years of the outbreak. They’re overworked, and despite being an essential profession in our society, many feel underpaid and underappreciated. Many other challenges indicate that healthcare is shifting:

Provider burnout and staffing shortages: Healthcare systems globally are grappling with clinician burnout and significant staffing shortages. Working capacity is limited, which snowballs into longer wait times for appointments, rushed consultations, and severely impacted quality of patient education. When something inevitably goes wrong with an intolerable workflow, trust and follow-up care suffer.

Patient engagement and adherence: When patient trust is impacted, their engagement in their care plans drops, which then stems into worse health outcomes. Traditional apps and portals struggle to provide the empathetic, human touch needed to motivate patients and answer questions succinctly, especially when trust in the US healthcare system is declining.

Accessibility and equity of care: Geographic and socioeconomic barriers prevent many from accessing care when they need it: rural patients, those with mobility issues, or the uninsured delay receiving crucial treatment due to high costs.

Operational efficiency and administrative costs: Providers are stretched thin, expected to do more with less. Administrative tasks, patient questions, and scheduling absorb essential staff time for critical care and even decompression time for practitioners. The hospital can’t run if everyone is constantly burned out.

These challenges set the stage for the adoption of AI avatars. They underscore that patient-centric care is not only essential, but that video agents enhance the patient-provider relationship, and only when they operate within strict safety and ethical guidelines.

The need for Video Agents in patient-centric care

Artificial intelligence is becoming central to the strategy of modern healthcare platforms. 66% of providers report using AI to assist in everyday tasks. AI avatars are now leveraged for a better patient-provider relationship. Key ways personas are used include:

Constant patient engagement

Anam video agents provide 24/7 interactive support for patient engagement and education. Clinical guidance and prescribing remain under licensed providers. Personas should not be positioned as autonomous sources of medical advice.

Personalized patient education

Video agents are capable of delivering complex medical education into something more digestible, adapting their dialogue to the patient's preferred language or literacy level. Anam avatars’ nuanced and emotive approach has improved comprehension and recall in several use cases.

Increased confidence for providers

Video agents can surface structured information from provider systems, assist with education, or simulate clinical discussions. They do not autonomously interpret imaging or make diagnostic calls. “When we talk about the application of AI, we can think of applying it across the entire spectrum of health care specialties, from the administrative side through to clinical care,” according to Samir Kendale, MD, FASA.

Clinical training and simulation

We’ve already talked about patient education, but what about physician training? AI avatars act as realistic “virtual patients,” allowing students to practice diagnostics, bedside manner, and difficult conversations in a risk-free, controllable environment.

According to a recent study, “[p]articipants expressed high trust in their GPs and were willing to share health data if AI was used as a support tool rather than replacing GPs.”

Video agents are not here to replace healthcare providers. They are a tool to make their jobs easier.

AI Personas on the frontline of healthcare

Move beyond the chatbot.

Video agents are conversational AI avatars that extend patient care teams through interactive video, ensuring enough overhead for your clinical team.

Scaling patient support: A single video agent can simultaneously handle hundreds of patient interactions, thanks to WebRTC streaming and stateless architecture. Personas don’t replace licensed nurses, but they reduce workload by addressing FAQs, education, and follow-up logistics, to help human professionals operate at an optimal (i.e., comfortable) level.

Consistency and protocol adherence: Every patient receives information based on the same vetted LLM and Anam system prompt configuration, ensuring that developers supply evidence-based protocols through the delivery layer via avatars, voice, and SDK.

Education: Institutions like Arizona State University are experimenting with artificial intelligence in a diagnostic and transcription setting.

"It's an education tool that's meant to be fun and educate pre-health students, any students interested in health, about the process of making a diagnosis and interacting with patients," said Sherine Gabriel, executive vice president of ASU Health.

Southern Illinois University has started to use AI virtual patients, and initial results are encouraging.

“The potential’s practically limitless,” said Dr. Richard Selinfreund, associate professor at SIU. “Imagine that every person, every medical expert could train on their phone or on a computer before they walked into a scenario and actually see a real patient. They can develop confidence and get a measurement of their patients’ trust. It’s an enormous breakthrough in medical education.”

Redefining healthcare with Video Agents

In 2025, healthcare providers and software companies must deliver more personalized, efficient, and patient-centric care. Video agents offer the empathy, scalability, and intelligence needed to meet these demands while enabling healthcare providers the space they need to do their jobs better. Organizations that thoughtfully integrate this technology gain a decisive advantage – stronger patient relationships, improved outcomes, and a more sustainable future for holistic care.

Disclaimer: Anam video agents are designed to support patient engagement, education, and simulation. They do not provide medical diagnoses or replace licensed healthcare professionals. All clinical decisions should be made by qualified providers.