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Healthcare friction—the everyday inefficiencies and slowdown provider operations and impact quality of patient care—continues to be a challenge. Whether it's information friction, where critical knowledge gets trapped in silos and fails to flow to the right people at the right time, or payer-provider friction, involving tangled reimbursement processes and delays, the consequences of friction have a ripple effect throughout the healthcare ecosystem.
Digital health has long promised to reduce these barriers by saving time, lowering costs, and improving care delivery. But the flood of innovation can contribute to challenges of its own—point-solution fatigue, vendor sprawl (i.e., excessive proliferation of third-party tech and services), and a fragmented digital infrastructure (e.g., unfinished integrations with legacy systems) that undermine its promise.
An often overlooked challenge (and opportunity) lies in making innovation seamless. For enterprise leaders, seamlessness means solutions that integrate into existing infrastructure without excessive lift. For clinicians and staff, it means technology that fits naturally into workflows. And for patients, it means care that feels coordinated rather than piecemeal.
At LG NOVA, we're keeping a close eye on two transformational forces that have the potential to make healthcare more seamless: automation via agentic artificial intelligence (AI), and "platformization" via M&A.
To date, healthcare AI has largely served "co-pilot" roles, supporting workflow-specific tasks, guided by user prompts. Agentic AI AI represents the next horizon, where autonomous systems can act across workflows with limited human oversight, taking on responsibilities that have traditionally required human intervention.
This shift is unfolding in real time. Insight Health recently emerged from stealth with its AI agent Lumi, which gathers detailed patient histories and updated medication lists—much like a physician or physician assistant—and schedules follow-ups—much like in-office administrative staff. Mayo Clinic is piloting Joy, an AI agent developed by VoiceCare AI, to make B2B calls on behalf of revenue cycle management teams, handling insurance verification, prior authorization, claims processing, and appeals. Like Joy and Lumi, AI agents aren't confined to single functions—they coordinate tasks across distinct workflows, supported by interoperability and guardrails that enable adoption at scale.
Agentic AI has potential to evolve healthcare infrastructure, streamlining and unifying care delivery to create more seamless patient experiences.
And yet, even as AI advances, fragmentation persists. The average healthcare enterprise relies on dozens of digital tools that don’t talk to each other. Patients face a maze of portals, and providers juggle distinct software tools. The result? Disjointed care.
That's where platformization (i.e., integrating disparate point solutions into broader, cohesive platform offerings), also described as tapestry weaving by Rock Health, can play a transformative role. Consider recent examples—Datavant just acquired data retrieval company Ontellus to enable patient health record digitization, not too long after acquiring Aetion in May to expand its real-world evidence data platform offering. In its eighth acquisition since 2023, CoachCare acquired fellow startup VitalTech in March to deepen its remote patient monitoring offering for health systems. Rather than simple feature add-ons, these acquisitions reflect strategies to consolidate capabilities and minimize vendor sprawl for enterprise customers.
The boots-on-the-ground implications of platformization for enterprise customers range from minimizing integration lift to increasing the likelihood of adoption at scale.
Agentic AI and tapestry weaving address fragmentation from different angles. AI agents can reduce friction in healthcare by enabling information to flow across otherwise siloed functions, workflows, and interactions between individuals and systems. Tapestry weaving reduces the amount of resources required for adoption by unifying point solutions into platforms that enterprises can integrate more readily. Together, they promise tools that support clinicians without adding disruption and enable connected, cohesive patient experiences.
At LG NOVA, we believe less friction in healthcare is not only achievable—it is emerging. And at InnoSummit 2025, we’re bringing together changemakers building seamless care, from AI-powered platforms and integration-first startups to health systems and community partners. We'll spotlight innovators deploying agentic AI and weaving tapestries with strategic acquisitions to reshape healthcare.
Seamless, whole-person care won’t be delivered by any one player; it will be woven together by many. Join us on October 15 in Mountain View to collaborate, learn, and bring this vision of seamless care to life.
Request your invite here.