How Gemini Enterprise and NTT DATA help healthcare prevent administrative friction

Healthcare organizations have invested billions in electronic health records (EHRs), revenue cycle platforms, claims systems, patient engagement tools and data modernization initiatives. Yet administrative complexity continues to slow care delivery and increase costs for providers, payers, clinicians and patients. Prior authorizations delay treatment, claim denials generate rework, clinicians spend valuable time on documentation, and patients often struggle to navigate a fragmented experience.

Healthcare leaders are looking to AI to address this challenge. But the real opportunity is not simply adding more AI; it's applying AI in ways that remove unnecessary work, accelerate access to care and improve outcomes and experiences for patients. It's rethinking how work gets done and leveraging AI to eliminate friction before it occurs.

The strategic partnership between NTT DATA and Google Cloudis built to help healthcare organizations resolve this friction.

By combining Gemini Enterprise - Google Cloud's platform for governed, enterprise-wide agents - with our healthcare domain and operational expertise, we turn isolated agentic AI pilots focused on speeding up existing processes into orchestrated, production-grade workflows that prevent administrative friction before it starts.

The challenge: Automation without orchestration

Healthcare organizations are rapidly exploring AI across both clinical and operational functions. Yet adoption alone does not deliver transformation. Many AI initiatives focus on automating individual tasks, while the broader workflows that connect people, systems and decisions remain fragmented.

As a result, organizations often see pockets of efficiency but continue to struggle with administrative complexity. Information must still move across multiple systems, handoffs remain manual and staff spend considerable time coordinating processes rather than advancing outcomes.

The technology exists to automate tasks. The greater challenge is connecting those capabilities into intelligent workflows that work together across the healthcare ecosystem.

So, how do healthcare organizations move from making tasks faster to eliminating avoidable work altogether?

The next stage of AI is not simply automation. It is enabling intelligent workflows where AI supports routine activities. It's agents executing coordinated actions across systems. It's people focusing on exceptions, monitoring and making critical decisions. The goal is to move intelligence upstream, preventing friction rather than responding to it later.

Revenue cycle management as a proving ground

Revenue cycle management is one of the best examples of how administrative friction impacts healthcare organizations. Workflows for prior authorizations, eligibility checks, claims processing and denials management often involve multiple people, disconnected systems and repetitive manual work.

These processes are ideal candidates for agentic AI because they require coordination, decision support and orchestration across the end-to-end workflow.

The same opportunity is becoming more common in clinical and care management processes. Organizations are looking beyond task automation toward more connected and intelligent operations.

The answer: Gemini Enterprise, with NTT DATA's healthcare expertise

The platform and the practice

Healthcare doesn't need more isolated AI. It needs governed, multistep work across the systems it already has. As a Google Cloud Diamond Partner and Gemini Enterprise Healthcare Launch Partner, NTT DATA provides that blueprint. Gemini Enterprise provides the platform; NTT DATA makes it work in healthcare.

A front door for every healthcare team

The Gemini Enterprise application provides Gemini models, search capabilities across connected business systems, deep research and no-code tools for building agents. NTT DATA turns payers' medical policies and authorization rules into curated, versioned knowledge sources that agents can rely on. We then redesign roles, so revenue cycle analysts, utilization management nurses and patient access teams change how they work.

An agent platform built for regulated work

The Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform supports long-running agents that can keep a case open for up to seven days. Each agent has a verified identity and policies that control what it can reach. NTT DATA redesigns workflows such as prior authorization and denial management around prevention and then defines where agents act and where people make decisions. Clinicians make clinical and adverse determinations.

A healthcare data backbone

The Gemini Enterprise Cloud Healthcare API stores and standardizes clinical and imaging data in formats such as Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR), Health Level Seven International Version 2 (HL7v2) and Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM).

NTT DATA builds the EHR, payer, clearinghouse and FHIR integrations that feed and hold up that data in production. In healthcare, that integration, rather than the model, is usually what stalls AI.

4 dimensions of expertise

NTT DATA contributes four dimensions of expertise that most technology partners cannot match:

1. Clinical: We understand clinical documentation, care coordination, decision support and new care models because we have worked inside them.
2. Financial: We understand revenue cycle and administrative process transformation because we have run both at scale.
3. Technical: We understand electronic health records as well as core modernization, cloud, application programming interfaces (APIs), interoperability and governed data platforms that bring EHRs, claims, imaging, devices and operational data together through FHIR and semantic context.
4. Governance: Healthcare organizations need AI that operates within clear guardrails. We help clients create rules that ensure agentic AI solutions align with regulatory requirements, organizational policies, security standards and clinical oversight.

Gemini Enterprise provides the enterprise intelligence and agentic layer that connects people, knowledge and agents. NTT DATA provides the healthcare operating context. We redesign workflows to integrate with clinical and administrative platforms, govern decisions, define human-agent handoffs, drive adoption and operate at scale. The differentiation is not another AI implementation. It is a healthcare operating model built to move from isolated agents to coordinated execution.

Applying agentic AI to move beyond automation

By pairing Gemini Enterprise with NTT DATA's healthcare expertise, we redesign three impact points in the revenue cycle where administrative friction is most visible:

• Financial clearance and prior authorization: An agentic workflow synthesizes clinical documentation, coverage and payer policies before care starts. It submits completed requests, tracks responses and routes only ambiguous edge cases to humans, so patients aren't turned away at the door.
• Claim readiness and submission: Many claim denials are due to missing information, coding inconsistencies or documentation gaps. Agentic AI can help identify potential issues before claims are submitted by reviewing documentation, validating coding requirements and verifying payer-specific rules. The outcome is not simply faster claims processing. It's improved claim quality and fewer avoidable denials.
• Denial prevention and resolution: When a claim is denied, providers often spend significant time investigating the cause, gathering supporting documentation and resubmitting information. Agentic AI can help analyze denial patterns, identify root causes, recommend corrective actions and support the appeals process. Over time, organizations can reduce recurring denial issues and improve reimbursement outcomes. The common thread is orchestration across systems, rules, agents and people, which stops avoidable work from being created in the first place.

Where this connects to care

Administrative friction is not separate from care delivery. When authorization, documentation or coverage decisions stall, care can stall with them. Removing that friction can improve timely access to care, restore capacity to healthcare teams and reduce uncertainty for patients:

• A delayed prior authorization is a delayed procedure.
• A denied claim that triggers rework is time a clinician spends on paperwork instead of patients.
• A surprise bill is a patient who avoids follow-up care.

Doing so is both a financial and a healthcare intervention. When agentic AI moves intelligence upstream, it moves care upstream, too.

This is also where utilization management enters the picture. The same agentic capabilities that orchestrate prior authorization, clinical documentation and payer policies can extend into UM workflows. Coordinating utilization review, surfacing medical necessity evidence and routing complex cases to the right clinical expert are all points where administrative orchestration and clinical decision support meet.

Momentum for a new era of healthcare operations

AI used thoughtfully can help healthcare organizations reduce administrative burden, improve coordination across systems and allow people to focus on higher-value activities. Used poorly, it risks simply helping organizations perform inefficient processes faster. Providers and payers do not need to automate against each other faster. They need to learn to use agentic AI to eliminate administrative work that should not exist in the first place - while redirecting human expertise to work that requires judgment. The goal is to move intelligence upstream, not simply push automation downstream.

That is how healthcare will move beyond automation and cure administrative friction. And it's where NTT DATA and Google Cloud can create a different model together.

What to do next

Ready to collaborate on the future of your AI strategy and transition to orchestrated, production-grade agentic workflows? Learn more about the Healthcare solutionswe're building with our Gemini Enterprise capabilities.