Tempus AI announced it has raised up to $9.5 million in funding from the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H). The award will fund the development of an autonomous clinical AI agent for heart failure care. The goal of this initiative is to create an AI agent that can act as an extension of the clinical team. It will also take care of cardiovascular patients without human intervention.” Tempus AI has announced that it has been selected by ARPA-H, an agency within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Funding is provided by the ARPA-H ADVOCATE program. It stands for Agentic AI-EnableD CardioVascular CAre TransfOrmation.
Furthermore, the funding will support product development and clinical validation. Tempus AI will test the system through a multi-center prospective study. The goal is to establish safe and effective autonomous care for patients with heart failure. More than 6 million Americans currently live with heart failure. Nearly half of these patients die within five years of receiving a diagnosis. However, modern medicine provides several therapies that can extend patients’ lives.
Despite these options, fewer than 25 percent of heart failure patients receive all guideline-recommended care1. Limited access to cardiologists remains a major challenge. Nearly 46 percent of U.S. counties do not have a practicing cardiologist. As a result, the ARPA-H ADVOCATE program seeks to expand access through scalable healthcare AI technology. The program aims to develop an AI agent that extends the capabilities of clinical teams. It will provide reliable care around the clock while maintaining safety and effectiveness.
“Heart disease remains the leading cause of preventable death in the United States, driving hundreds of billions of dollars in annual healthcare costs,” said Brandon Fornwalt, MD, PhD, Senior Vice President of Cardiology at Tempus. “In part, that’s because our healthcare system simply doesn’t have enough people to deliver the care we know these patients need. The ARPA-H ADVOCATE program is tackling this challenge head-on with technology, and we are thrilled to have been selected to build the first AI agent designed to operate as a fully autonomous member of the clinical team.”
Tempus AI Advances Autonomous Cardiovascular Care
Tempus AI’s proposed solution will continuously monitor multiple sources of patient information. These sources include clinical data from electronic health records. They also include consumer-generated data from home-based heart rate monitors. This approach will support a platform with a patient-facing autonomous AI agent. The agent will help manage several areas of cardiovascular care. These areas include symptoms, medications, virtual rehabilitation, and scheduling.
In addition, the platform will connect with the electronic health record. This connection will help maintain accurate and consistent documentation. It will also support better coordination across the patient’s care journey. The proposed AI agent builds on Tempus AI’s existing healthcare technology portfolio. This includes Olivia, an agentic patient concierge developed by the company. Olivia centralizes and organizes multimodal information from patients’ clinical histories.
The solution will also build on Tempus Next. This care-gap software has already screened more than 2.7 million cardiology patients. The platform supports efforts to identify gaps in recommended patient care.
Tempus AI also has experience in cardiovascular risk detection with its ECG-AI portfolio. The company has three FDA cleared ECG-AI products . These products are designed to offer active detection of risks for undiagnosed cardiovascular diseases.
These technologies together provide a foundation for the proposed autonomous clinical AI agent. The new initiative could further extend the use of AI by healthcare teams in cardiovascular care. The ARPA-H ADVOCATE program therefore aims to address both access and care-delivery challenges. It marries autonomous AI capabilities with existing clinical workflows.” Ultimately, the initiative aims to scale and coordinate heart failure care to improve access.
The new funding will enable Tempus AI to accelerate product development and clinical validation. The company will investigate the system in a planned multi-center study as well. These efforts will contribute to assessing the AI agent’s ability to support safe cardiovascular care at scale.
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News Source: Businesswire.com
