By Kristin Ryan, EVP, AI Transformation & Acceleration
For the past few years, healthcare marketers have been focused on a major shift in how people discover information: patients and physicians are asking AI for answers instead of clicking through search results. Meta’s new Muse app that launched in early September suggests the next shift may already be underway: AI is moving from answering questions to taking action.
What is Muse?
Muse is designed as a personal AI agent. Instead of responding to one prompt at a time, it can maintain context around a user’s goals, work across apps and websites, browse the web, complete multi-step tasks, monitor information and take certain actions on the user’s behalf. Today, someone might ask an AI tool, “What should I ask my doctor about my high cholesterol?” An agentic experience could eventually do much more such as understand that person’s health goals, review information they have chosen to connect, help them make sense of lab results, prepare questions for an appointment, track relevant information over time and remind them about next steps. Early integrations are pointing in this direction. Health platforms including Function and HealthEx have announced connections that can bring personal health information into Muse. HealthEx has described use cases such as creating visit summaries, preparing questions for physicians and providing refill reminders.
Taking pressure off patients
Healthcare discovery has always required a surprising amount of work from the patient. They are required to search for symptoms, sort through and find credible sources, understand a diagnosis, compare information, locate a physician, prepare for an appointment, remember what the physician said, navigate insurance and patient-support programs and follow through afterward. AI agents have the potential to compress some of that work. The behavioral shift could move from “I need to search for this.” to “I’ll ask my agent to figure this out.” And eventually “I’ll ask my agent to handle this.”
These health agents don’t need to diagnose disease or prescribe treatment to change the patient journey. Simply helping people organize information, prepare for conversations, navigate resources and manage follow-up could reshape how healthcare decisions get made by patients and physicians.
Adding intelligence for physicians
The physician experience could change, too. Muse may initially affect physicians less through direct adoption and more through the patients who use it. More patients may arrive at appointments with AI-generated visit summaries, organized symptom histories, treatment questions, interpretations of lab information or structured lists of topics they want to discuss. The patient–physician interaction could start to look more like Patient -> AI agent -> Physician -> AI agent -> Patient. The agent becomes an intelligence layer around the clinical encounter, helping patients prepare beforehand, then interpret and act on information afterward. That could make the moments immediately before and after an appointment increasingly important parts of the healthcare communications journey.
GEO has already forced marketers to rethink what discoverability means when an AI system answers a question without sending someone to a website and agents take that challenge one step further. The new journey could become Intent, Agent, Information, Recommendation, Action. With that, website traffic becomes an increasingly incomplete measure of influence.
A few things that matter for healthcare marketers in this emerging environment:
Machine-readable authority matters. Information about indications, safety, dosing, access, support programs and disease education needs to be structured clearly enough for both people and machines to understand.
Marketers should expand their focus from “questions to win” to “questions and actions to support.” What will patients ask agents to explain, compare, prepare, monitor, navigate or complete?
The patient journey may need to be redrawn. AI will sit between traditional touchpoints, connecting information and experiences that previously existed in separate channels.
Trust is even more important. The closer AI gets to healthcare actions, the higher the stakes around accuracy, transparency, provenance, privacy, and human oversight.
Takeaways
Muse itself may or may not become the dominant health agent but it represents a transition. We moved from search engines to answer engines. Now we may be moving from answer engines to action engines.
For us, the next frontier of discoverability will be focused on whether your information is authoritative, structured and useful enough to become part of how an AI helps someone navigate their health.
Interested in hearing more? Connect with us here.