Dr. Pastoor on KevinMD: Agentic AI and the Future of Annual Preventive Exams

Elation’s own Sara Pastoor, MD, family physician and primary care leader, was recently featured on KevinMD highlighting how agentic AI can rescue one of the most undervalued but essential parts of U.S. primary care: the annual preventive exam.

In the piece, “Agentic AI: the key to saving annual preventive exams,” Dr. Pastoor lays out a blunt reality: despite their proven value, annual wellness and well-child visits are systematically deprioritized in a system that rewards sick care and volume over prevention. Only about 60% of Medicare beneficiaries and less than 65% of children under 19 complete their annual well visits, leaving massive gaps in prevention and population health.

Dr. Pastoor argues the problem isn’t the clinical purpose of these visits—it’s the process and operational drag wrapped around them. Preventive encounters:

• Consume significant time and clinic capacity without proportional reimbursement

• Depend on proactive outreach to patients who feel well and may not seek care

• Compete with access for acute and complex visits that feel more urgent day to day

The result: physicians are pushed into acting as data clerks, process navigators, and coding experts, instead of focusing on high-impact clinical decision-making and relationship-building.

Where Agentic AI Changes the Game

Dr. Pastoor makes the case that **agentic AI—AI capable of performing complex, multistep tasks end-to-end—**is uniquely suited to take on the repetitive, rules-based, documentation-heavy work that powers preventive care.

She describes a “virtual concierge” for the entire preventive care cycle, including:

• Invisible translation of payer contracts and industry standards into patient-specific action items

• Seamless workflow execution across patient identification, outreach, intake, risk assessment, data synthesis, agenda prep, care coordination, education materials, documentation, and follow-up

• Financial guardrails by natively managing documentation to payer standards and automating coding and billing so practices capture every eligible dollar

Because these visits follow a predictable, repeatable life cycle, Dr. Pastoor argues they are “primed” for automation that can escort each step from start to finish—“lather, rinse, repeat”—without dropping balls.

Unleashing Human Time for What Matters Most

Crucially, Dr. Pastoor emphasizes that this isn’t about replacing clinicians. It’s about eliminating the cognitive and administrative tax that keeps physicians from doing the work only humans can do:

• Practicing nuanced clinical judgment

• Partnering with patients and families through counseling and shared decision-making

• Building the trust that anchors long-term primary care relationships

By offloading the logistical grind of preventive visits to agentic AI, she envisions a future where preventive care becomes both sustainable and central—not an afterthought squeezed into overburdened schedules, but a reliable engine for better population health and stronger primary care.

Dr. Pastoor's KevinMD feature is a powerful signal of where primary care is headed: agentic AI not as a gimmick, but as critical infrastructure to make prevention work—for physicians, practices, and the patients who rely on them.