If you zoom out for a second, healthcare -2025 edition - looks oddly familiar.
We’ve digitised almost everything, hospital records, sickness benefits, pharmacy stock, care journeys … and yet for most people the actual experience still feels like:
- a handful of portals with different logins
- letters that arrive two weeks too late
- phone queues where you repeat the same story three times
On the inside, it’s not that different. Hospitals, payers, and pharmacy retailers are all drowning in tools, tickets and data silos. Everyone is “doing digital” but very few are truly operating AI-native.
Over the past six years at Nimble we’ve been fortunate (and humbled 🙏🏻) to build with almost every major side of this ecosystem:
- Hospitals like Maria Middelares, where our updated showcase is all about lifestyle journeys and premium patient experience.
- Payers like Helan, CM and Vanbreda, where reimbursement, prevention and member engagement collide.
- Pharmacy retailers like Medi-Market, Coop and Multipharma, who sit closest to the “moment of action” in the real world.
Seen from that vantage point, the pattern is clear: the real opportunity is not “yet another app”, but an infinite care team quietly working behind the scenes.
Let me explain. 😉
From fragmented touchpoints to an infinite care team
Most digital health journeys today are designed around transactions:
- “Book an appointment”
- “Claim your refund”
- “Order your medication”
Useful, yes. Transformative, not really. 😕
What AI - and specifically agentic AI - makes possible is a subtle but profound shift:
From: “Here is a portal where you can do things.”
To: “Here is a care team that continuously works on your behalf.”
When I say infinite care team, I mean a network of specialised AI agents that:
- Know enough about you (safely and consented) to understand your context
- Collaborate behind the scenes across hospital, payer and pharmacy systems
- Nudge, explain, arrange and follow up so you don’t have to orchestrate everything yourself
For a member or patient, that feels like:
- not missing follow-up appointments
- understanding what is reimbursed without reading PDFs
- being reminded to renew chronic medication before you run out
- and being pointed to preventive programmes that actually fit your life
For the organisations we work with, it unlocks something even more interesting:
→ a way to finally connect all those investments in portals, data, and services into one coherent, AI-native operating model.
And this is where the three big sub-segments – hospitals, payers and pharmacy retailers – start to reinforce each other instead of competing for “app time”.
1. Payers: from claims machine to everyday health companion
Let’s start with the payers, because whether they like it or not, they are structurally positioned to become the digital front door for everyday health.
Working with organisations like Helan, CM and Vanbreda, we keep seeing the same two tensions:
- They carry a huge part of the cost and risk in the system.
- They only show up in people’s lives a few times per year.
That’s a terrible mismatch if you want to influence outcomes.
Agentic AI flips that dynamic:
- A benefits explainer agent that turns legalese into human language and simulations.
- A care navigation agent that looks across your contract, your situation and the broader ecosystem and suggests the next best step.
- A proactive outreach agent that spots patterns in claims and touchpoints and nudges you towards screening, lifestyle programmes or cheaper-but-equivalent care options.
And importantly: these agents don’t live in a single app.
They surface:
- inside the payer’s own channels
- inside hospital experiences
- at the pharmacy counter
- and eventually in horizontal platforms people already use every day.
That’s what we’re designing for with NimbleHealthOS. An opinionated, AI-native foundation that gives payers:
- best-of-breed building blocks (identity, consent, journeys, messaging, analytics)
- the glue in between (event streams, orchestration, agent hand-offs)
- and a cutting-edge omnichannel white-labeled front-end that drastically reduces time-to-market while still allowing deep tailoring
So instead of spending two years debating the basics of “yet another app”, payers can plug into rails that are ready for multi-agent care teams from day one.
2. Hospitals: experience as the new competitive edge
Hospitals like Maria Middelares are already incredibly good at high-intensity care.
Where things get messy is everything before and after the actual encounter.
At the same time, hospitals are moving into a more competitive landscape:
- Payers are building their own digital front doors
- Telehealth providers and niche clinics are cherry-picking profitable flows
- Patients are starting to choose based on convenience and experience, not just proximity
In that world, the hospital of the future won’t differentiate only on medical excellence (which is becoming a hygiene factor), but on experience:
- How easy is it to prepare for a visit?
- How calm or chaotic does the journey feel?
- How supported do you feel once you leave the building?
In our work on lifestyle and follow-up trajectories with Maria Middelares, we keep asking one question:
“What if the hospital experience didn’t stop at the parking lot and that was a deliberate differentiator?” 🤔
What an AI-native, infinite care team for hospitals looks like:
- Pre-visit agents that prepare patients: what to expect, how to prepare, what questions to ask → reducing anxiety and no-shows.
- In-hospital companions that help navigate buildings, waiting times and ad-hoc questions without adding load to the nursing staff.
- Post-visit follow-up agents that translate discharge notes into daily-life actions, check in on adherence, and escalate when things go off track.
Technically, these agents don’t all “belong” to the hospital.
Some work on behalf of the payer, some on behalf of the pharmacy retailer, some for the patient themself.
But from the patient’s perspective, it’s one continuous thread, and that’s where hospitals can stand out.
NimbleHealthOS deliberately treats hospitals as key players in the ecosystem, not isolated monoliths:
- It integrates with existing EHRs and hospital portals instead of pretending they don’t exist.
- It treats hospital data as events that agents can react to: a new diagnosis, a lab result, a physical therapy plan.
- It makes it trivial to spin up specialised micro-experiences: from a diabetes pathway to a post-op coaching flow … all sitting on the same infrastructure.
Hospitals don’t need to become tech companies.
They need rails that allow them to compete and differentiate on experience by plugging into the infinite care team without rebuilding their world.
3. Pharmacy retailers: the real-world action layer
If payers are the financial backbone and hospitals the clinical core, then pharmacy retailers like Medi-Market, Coop and Multipharma are the action layer where advice, logistics, and behaviour change collide in the real world.
Pharmacies see people more often than almost any other healthcare actor.
Yet their digital stack is often reduced to e-commerce with a search bar.
An AI-native pharmacy experience can be so much more:
- A medication adherence agent that knows your prescriptions (with consent), your payer coverage and your habits and coordinates reminders, refills and check-ins.
- A counter support agent that assists pharmacists with up-to-date interaction checks, lifestyle advice and programme referrals while they talk to the patient.
- A personal health concierge spanning OTC products, reimbursed care and preventive services, not just pushing “the promo of the week”.
Crucially, the pharmacy shouldn’t be forced into adopting someone else’s brand.
That’s why NimbleHealthOS is white-labeled by default:
→ Same agentic backbone, same analytics, same interoperability, but with the retailer’s own brand, UX and proposition on top.
When you do this right, pharmacy retailers become visible members of the infinite care team, not just “the place where you pick things up”.
NimbleHealthOS: rails, not another platform
We’re deliberately opinionated about this: healthcare doesn’t need another heavy, closed ecosystem.
It needs rails.
NimbleHealthOS is our attempt at codifying everything we’ve learnt across hospitals, payers and pharmacy retailers into a reusable foundation that is:
- Strongly opinionated where it matters
- domain models for members, patients, episodes of care and benefits
- best-practice flows for onboarding, consent, notifications and journeys
- sane defaults for privacy, auditability and explainability
- Radically flexible where it counts
- composable services that can sit in your cloud, your stack, your regulator’s comfort zone
- a white-labeled omnichannel front-end you can skin, extend or completely replace
- multi-agent patterns that let you start small (one helpful “assistant”) and grow into a full infinite care team
We don’t claim to have all the answers.
But we’ve seen enough repeated mistakes to know that starting from scratch in 2026 is mostly a waste of time.
The organisations that will win the next decade are the ones that:
- Accept that AI-native operating models are not optional.
- Anchor them in concrete use cases that reduce friction and improve trust - today.
- Build on foundations that let every actor - hospital, payer, pharmacy, and “others” - join the same continuous journey.
A practical, slightly opinionated conclusion
If there’s one thing our work with Maria Middelares, Helan, CM, Vanbreda, Medi-Market, Coop, Multipharma and others has taught us, it’s this:
The technology is no longer the bottleneck. The courage to work differently together
The infinite care team is not science fiction.
Pieces of it are already live, in production, serving real people.
The next step is to connect those pieces:
- Let payers become everyday health companions instead of distant claim processors.
- Let hospitals deliberately differentiate on experience in a more competitive landscape.
- Let pharmacy retailers step fully into their role as accessible, trusted actors in the ecosystem.
Our bet with NimbleHealthOS is simple:
- Give the ecosystem AI-native rails instead of yet another isolated product.
- Make it faster and safer to experiment.
- And keep the human - the member, the patient, the pharmacist, the nurse – at the centre of every design decision.
One infinite care team, many organisations, one continuous journey.
If you’re responsible for hospitals, insurance, or pharmacy at your organisation and you want to explore what this could look like in your context, I’m always happy to grab a (real or virtual) coffee.
We’re not here to sell you a silver bullet.
We’re here to help you build the rails for the next decade of care.
