At Hospital for Special Surgery, AI agents now process 1,100 insurance claims monthly, cutting appeals time from 45 minutes to five and raising success rates from 65% to 100%, allowing all claims handling to move in-house after nine months. Previous digital tools such as EHR systems mandated in the early 2000s and telehealth platforms produced fragmented data and added administrative load rather than reducing it. Agentic systems differ by making autonomous decisions drawn from institutional knowledge bases while escalating uncertain cases to clinicians, a pattern that aligns with documented global workforce deficits projected by the World Health Organization to reach 10 million unfilled positions by 2030.