Bumrungrad International Hospital, one of Asia’s most prominent private healthcare providers, is deploying AI across its contact centre operations as part of a broader push to modernise how it serves patients — and, eventually, how it manages care from admission to discharge.

The Bangkok-based hospital, which treats more than a million patients each year, has partnered with Salesforce to implement Agentforce, an agentic AI platform that goes beyond conventional automation by enabling AI systems to take independent action within defined parameters. The rollout marks a significant step in Bumrungrad International Hospital’s long-term tech strategy, which already incorporates Salesforce’s CRM platforms MuleSoft and Tableau.

For James McLeary, the hospital’s Chief Information Officer and Chief Information Security Officer, the distinction between standard automation and agentic AI is more than semantics.

“These agents should not only have access to the best and most relevant patient information, but they also have the ability to take action, whether it’s for setting appointments, facilitating admissions, aiding in diagnosis or finalising billing,” McLeary said in an email interview with e27.

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In the initial phase of the Agentforce deployment, AI agents are operating in Bumrungrad International Hospital’s contact centre to handle the initial stages of incoming patient requests. The system summarises communications, extracts patient intent, automatically categorises cases by type and subcategory, and generates draft responses for human agents to review before sending.

Cases are then routed to the relevant teams based on that classification.

This means human staff are not yet removed from the process. They remain the final checkpoint before a response reaches a patient. However, the groundwork is being laid for a more autonomous model.

Looking ahead, the hospital intends to enable AI agents to resolve cases entirely without human review, handling matters such as appointment booking and rescheduling, medical report status updates, transport arrangements, and cross-selling of wellness packages.

Addressing the trust question

Deploying AI in a healthcare setting brings particular scrutiny around data sensitivity and patient safety. McLeary acknowledged that guardrails are central to the approach.

Bumrungrad International Hospital applies what it describes as a cyber Defence in Depth strategy, including round-the-clock monitoring. On the platform side, Salesforce’s Trust Layer provides a governance framework to keep AI interactions secure and grounded in verified data — a safeguard against errors, such as AI hallucinations, that carry greater consequences in a clinical environment.

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Dynamic grounding connects the underlying language models to validated enterprise data sources, helping ensure that AI outputs are based on accurate, contextually relevant information rather than assumptions.

The hospital is tracking a set of operational and commercial metrics to evaluate the investment. These include reductions in service time from patient arrival to discharge, the elimination of queue times for patient engagement requests, and improvements in Net Promoter Scores as a measure of patient satisfaction.

Revenue growth is also a factor. Faster resolution of patient queries is expected to increase the volume of interactions handled successfully, while freeing staff to focus on higher-value tasks.

The road ahead

Before Bumrungrad International Hospital is prepared to let AI close cases without any human involvement, McLeary identified data infrastructure as the critical prerequisite — specifically, a unified platform that consolidates patient history, preferences, and medical records from across disparate hospital systems.

Staff and patient feedback will continue to inform the process. “As we do with any technology, we’ll have a continuous feedback loop with our staff and customers to ensure that their needs are being met,” McLeary said.

For a hospital that built its reputation on clinical excellence and international patient care, the move towards an AI-integrated operation represents an evolution in how that standard is maintained — not by replacing human judgement, but by augmenting the systems that support it.

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Image Credit: Bumrungrad International Hospital

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