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2025 was a rollercoaster year for the healthcare & life sciences industry, and major shifts in the regulatory environment will have a direct impact on healthcare delivery for both providers and payers in 2026. This is in addition to an ongoing labor shortage, an aging population with increased demands, and the ever-present challenges around managing claims and paying providers. 

It can seem like there is more to do than there is human capacity, but we can rethink this capacity in an AI-driven world. Agentforce is leading the charge when it comes to AI transformation, helping organizations implement AI agents that are conversational, nuanced, and compliant with industry regulations. 

Last year, Salesforce rebranded its Health Cloud and Life Sciences Cloud solutions as Agentforce Health and Agentforce Life Sciences to emphasize the platforms’ new agentic AI capabilities. Organizations can now scale always-on personalized support, delivering better patient experiences and member outcomes while expediting public health services. Keep reading to learn about the 2026 Salesforce trends that are streamlining processes and optimizing engagement for healthcare & life sciences organizations.

Enhanced patient and employee experiences with Agentforce Health 

How much time have you spent on the phone with an insurance company or a provider trying to get a simple approval for a procedure or a treatment? The frustration we’ve all felt during that process is a direct result of disconnected systems and manual workflows that are leading clinicians to burnout and compromising patient care.

Agentforce Health is not just about efficiency, it’s about providing tools to expand healthcare coverage and offer convenient care options. It builds on Agentforce’s topics and roles to deliver healthcare-specific personas and workflows like patient summary, EHR, patient registration, and real-time benefits verification to help teams work faster and smarter.

Right now, teams can perform real-time benefits eligibility verification and prior authorization, reducing the time to provide care and improving efficiencies. Home health agencies can use pre-call summaries and service recommendations to reduce the time from referral to care. Looking ahead to the Spring ’26 release, manual data entry will become a thing of the past thanks to pre-filled assessments and voice assessments, while offline mobile assessments eliminate connectivity challenges for field employees.  

Agentforce 360 for Health activates data across systems

While healthcare generates 30% of the world’s data, organizations fail to comprehend it. Tremendous amounts of information are generated every day, but most of it is inaccessible because of three key blockers:

  • Legacy systems that inhabit interoperability
  • Large EHRs that block access
  • Unstructured data that is difficult to access and harness 

Payers and providers have spent their time building large data lakes and warehouses to make sure that data is harmonized, but access is still an issue. Agentforce 360 for Health goes beyond storage to activate this data within your workflows. 

Salesforce’s Health APIs deliver industry standard interoperability so that systems can talk to each other. With MuleSoft, you can call your back-end systems like EHRs to help patients book an appointment or answer questions about their last visit. Data 360 connects to those external data lakes and warehouses via zero-copy to answer complex questions about out-of-pocket expense or explanation of benefits without moving data. With compliance by design and over 40 certifications, including HIPAA, Salesforce knows how to keep your data secure.

Agentforce 360 for Health’s unified platform brings the entire healthcare ecosystem together so that providers can deliver those critical applications without relying on point systems and legacy tools. They are also building applications for payers, bringing utilization management, care management, and provider network management to the same platform. This is not about integration; it’s about delivering value on day zero.

Transforming the call center to a care center

For years, payer and provider call centers have operated in a reactive mode, answering benefits questions, fixing claim issues, and moving from one transaction to the next. Agentforce Health reimagines the call center as a care center: a digital front door that drives engagement, closes care gaps, and supports whole-person health.

Members don’t want to wait on hold to solve every issue. Agentforce Health brings together phone, chat, secure messaging, SMS, and portals so members can connect however they prefer. Agents and care coordinators work in one unified console, seeing every interaction — clinical, administrative, and digital — in one place. No more swivel-chairing between systems. No more repeating information.

With Agentforce Health, each call, message, and chat is tied to the member’s longitudinal record: conditions, medications, benefits, claims, care plans, and SDoH needs. Data 360 unifies claims, clinical, and engagement data to surface high-risk members, enabling agents to spot care opportunities when answering questions. Routine calls become proactive care coordination moments:

  • A member asking about refills? Trigger a medication adherence task.
  • A parent asking about benefits? Identify missing immunizations.
  • A provider clarifying eligibility? Surface open authorizations or chronic care programs.

Automation plays a huge role in shifting from volume to value. AI Agents can answer common questions instantly, transcribe calls, and suggest next best actions. They escalate to a human when necessary, routing cases to the right employees and automatically kicking off follow-up tasks. Patients and providers feel known, heard, and supported while your human workforce can stop firefighting and start delivering real care coordination. 

Agentforce Life Sciences accelerates research and testing

Medtech and pharma organizations can boost productivity and make clinical trial management more efficient with Agentforce Life Sciences. It integrates unstructured and structured health data across multiple sources for comprehensive patient insights that can lead to faster drug development by automatically identifying potential drug candidates. The speed and precision of AI agents allows research teams to process and analyze large datasets at greater speeds while reducing the risk of human error, giving researchers more time to focus on iteration and innovation. 

Agentforce Life Sciences’ advanced scheduling, call planning, and content sharing features make it easier for medtech and pharma teams to build strong, productive relationships with providers. Sales teams can increase account profitability by leveraging AI for proactive outreach about upcoming expirations and up-sell opportunities and giving physicians access to data on the efficacy, safety, and tolerability of the medicines they are using on patients. 

Our healthcare & life sciences experts can help your organization implement these Salesforce solutions and improve health outcomes for patients and members. Reach out to our team to learn how we can help you achieve your 2026 objectives.