An important trend for the future of health technology will be the increasing use of intelligent agent software for medical applications. As the complexity of situations faced by both patients and health care providers grows, conventional interfaces that rely on users to manually transfer data and manually perform each problem-solving step, won't be able to keep up. This article describes how software agents that incorporate learning, personalization, proactivity, context-sensitivity and collaboration will lead to a new generation of medical applications that will streamline user interfaces and enable more sophisticated communication and problemsolving.