AI app store for healthcare promises to transform patient care

Would you appreciate calling your healthcare provider and being greeted by an AI assistant that can instantly schedule appointments and provide personalized care instructions based on your complete medical history? This scenario—both promising and potentially concerning—is becoming reality with Hippocratic AI’s new AI Agent App Store.

Launched in January 2025 following $141 million in funding, the platform allows licensed clinicians to create AI healthcare assistants for non-diagnostic tasks without programming knowledge. These assistants handle routine patient interactions while maintaining the personalized care that patients expect from their healthcare providers.

Clinician creators working with Hippocratic AI can set their own fees, earning 5% of the base fee and 70% of usage fees whenever their AI agent is used. Each healthcare assistant created on the app store platform undergoes rigorous safety testing by thousands of healthcare professionals before deployment.

“Since the founding of Hippocratic AI, we have believed that the best way to build safe and effective AI is through close collaboration with those delivering care,” said Munjal Shah, Co-Founder and CEO of Hippocratic AI. “Today, with the launch of our AI Agent App Store, we are also directly engaging licensed US clinicians to harness the power of AI. We truly believe that clinicians know best.”

Hippocratic AI hopes that providers will bring their expertise in specific healthcare scenarios—such as hospital at home screening and HPV vaccine discussion—to build an agent that could reliably perform those tasks and help alleviate the pain points of the nation’s current healthcare staffing crisis.

Big tech’s impact on the healthcare workforce

Workforce challenges have plagued the healthcare industry for decades, long before the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated staffing shortages and led to unprecedented levels of burnout and turnover. Developing a sustainable healthcare workforce requires significant investment in training, education, and ongoing support. Labor costs already account for the majority (60%) of hospital expenses—reaching $839 billion in 2024.

Some tech companies see this financial pressure as an opportunity. Silicon Valley-based AI company Artisan, for instance, directly targets these pain points in a provocative ad campaign that includes posting billboards across San Francisco with slogans like “AI won’t complain about work-life balance,” and “Stop hiring humans.” Their AI agents promise cost savings and efficiency gains in sales, marketing, and customer service—benefits that cash-strapped healthcare organizations might find difficult to resist.

But can we really lose the human touch in healthcare? While automation may address certain financial and staffing challenges, it raises profound questions about the essential nature of healing and caregiving that have always defined medicine.

Strong response from clinicians

The National Nurses United (NNU), the nation’s largest nurses’ union with nearly 225,000 members, has voiced strong opposition to AI implementation in healthcare. In January, more than 100,000 NNU members held nationwide protests demanding safe staffing levels and patient safeguards amid the introduction of AI technologies.

“Patient advocacy is at the core of what we do as nurses. That’s why we’re demanding safe staffing and protections against untested technologies such as A.I. We see the harm that these cost-cutting schemes cause our patients on a daily basis,” said Nancy Hagans, RN and a president of NNU.

The NNU published the Nurses and Patients’ Bill of Rights: Guiding Principles for A.I. Justice in Nursing and Health Care, which asserts that “the hands-on work of caring for other people cannot and should not ever be automated.”

A 2024 survey by NNU of over 2,300 registered nurses found that 60 percent didn’t trust their employers to implement AI with patient safety as the top priority. Nurses frequently reported that their clinical assessments differed from AI-generated assessments used in their facilities.

This situation raises critical questions about healthcare’s future. Are clinicians inadvertently contributing to their own professional obsolescence and shaping a Player Piano-esque future? Or could we be witnessing the creation of a new paradigm where healthcare workers leverage AI based on their expertise while maintaining control over, and gaining financial benefit from, its use? Currently, the impact on employment remains uncertain—will AI eliminate jobs, create new ones, or have no substantial impact on the workforce in either direction?

Projecting the vision of tech companies such as Hippocratic AI into the future, we can see a possible scenario in which one physician could use a dozen AI agents to manage their entire practice, increasing their efficiency and reach in providing care. That may be too extreme of a scenario to ever become reality, but much less far-fetched is the potential for AI to serve as a solution to address long standing workforce issues in healthcare such as access, affordability, and provider burnout.