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ARPA-H taps 7 organizations for AI cardiovascular care platform. Tech companies, providers and academics will design and test patient-facing artificial intelligence agents and an AI system to monitor them, while developing a health system implementation strategy that would extend 24/7 digital care to cardiac patients. By Andrea Fox, Senior Editor | September 21, 2026 | 1:22 PM The Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health has committed up to $33.7 million in the first year of a four-year, $62.7 million program under the Agentic AI-Enabled Cardiovascular Care Transformation (ADVOCATE) program to eliminate geographic barriers to cardiac care. With the project, tech companies Atman Health, Tempus AI and UpDoc will develop artificial intelligence-driven clinical and patient engagement tools, while Stanford University creates a real-time supervisory agent to monitor AI agents for patient safety. Duke University and Kaiser Permanente will then implement and validate enterprise implementation across care settings, while the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory independently evaluates ADVOCATE's technical performance and clinical outcomes. WHY IT MATTERS More than 200,000 Americans die each year from preventable impacts of cardiovascular disease. Despite it being the leading cause of death in the country, nearly half of U.S. counties lack cardiology providers, according to ARPA-H. ADVOCATE could save the lives of heart failure patients across the U.S., reduce preventable hospitalizations and generate an estimated $28 billion in annual cost savings, ARPA-H said in an announcement earlier this month. The goal is to develop an autonomous agent that can augment clinical support by understanding a patient's treatment needs, "capable of providing certain care autonomously, and equally capable of engaging the clinical team when needed," said Dr. Haider Warraich, manager of the ADVOCATE program, in a statement. Newly funded teams will work in collaboration with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to establish a regulatory framework for a new class of autonomous, patient-facing clinical AI and develop a scalable technology to reach cardiac disease patients wherever they live, said ARPA-H. With autonomous agents attached to clinical care providers, digital tools can support patients with heart failure between healthcare visits and escalate their needs to a human care team. Three tech companies will work closely together as a cohort to develop the ADVOCATE patient-facing clinical AI agent system with technical interfaces, safety benchmarks and evaluation protocols. Together they must submit a first-of-its-kind FDA authorization package for this product within 24 months of the award. "Patient-facing agentic AI is one of the most consequential frontiers in digital health," said Dr. Rick Abramson, director of the FDA Digital Health Center of Excellence. "Getting the regulatory framework right requires close, iterative collaboration between developers, clinicians and the FDA." * Atman Health will build an evidence-based clinical decision engine using large language models and a voice-first interface with which patients can interact. * Tempus AI will develop continuous patient monitoring with deeper clinical analysis in its Olivia patient health app. * UpDoc will design conversational intelligence based on a clinician-built rules system that validates every proposed action against approved protocols before execution. * Meanwhile, Stanford University will develop a disease-agnostic supervisory AI agent that continuously monitors ADVOCATE clinical agents after deployment to detect unsafe recommendations and out-of-distribution behavior in real time. It will be a three-stage, compute-escalating pipeline that handles outlier filtering, rule-based screening and deep-research auditing to produce "inspectable per-claim rationales," ARPA-H said. Thus, the supervisory agent would provide an ongoing assurance layer - ADVOCATE's defined AI accountability mechanism - for FDA, health systems, patients and clinicians. Then, two health systems will develop the scalable implementation to bring ADVOCATE agents to patients and clinicians across diverse care settings, including rural and underserved communities "where cardiology access is most constrained." * Duke University will manage a multi-site validation platform testing ADVOCATE agents across five health systems and rural sites on both Epic and Oracle electronic health records. * The American Heart Association will help to amplify the testing effort, ARPA-H noted. * Kaiser Permanente will embed ADVOCATE agents into EHR workflows for heart failure patients through an enterprise-scale deployment across 21 medical centers and more than 260 clinics to generate reusable deployment blueprints. * ARPA-H said it has also retained Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory to assess ADVOCATE's technical performance and clinical outcomes to validate results and strengthen regulatory confidence. THE LARGER TREND Many researchers have successfully demonstrated that increased access to AI innovations could help save more lives afflicted with heart disease each year. For example, a recent AHA report suggested an FDA-cleared AI tool called EchoGo could help clinicians detect a frequently missed form of heart failure among women and people of color - known as heart failure with preserved ejection fraction (HFpEF) - early, saving lives, reducing hospital use and lowering healthcare costs. With AHA's analysis of the tool, it created a framework that evaluates healthcare AI that considers patient outcomes, workflow effects, health equity and economics. "The ultimate measure of success is whether earlier detection consistently leads to faster intervention, more equitable care and better patient outcomes," Roger Owens, chief commercial officer at Ultromics, the maker of the AI tool, told Healthcare IT News last month. ON THE RECORD "This work will change how we practice medicine - and it would not happen without ARPA-H driving the vision for the future," said Warraich in a statement. "ARPA-H's ADVOCATE program is the kind of ambitious effort that will be critical as we think about continuous ongoing monitoring of autonomous clinical AI for both safety and effectiveness," added Abramson. Andrea Fox is senior editor of Healthcare IT News. Email: [email protected] Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS Media publication. HIMSS is hosting the one-day AI Executive Leadership Summit in San Diego on Oct. 21, 2026, followed by its AI in Healthcare Forum Oct. 22-23. Register separately for the two events here and here. WATCH NOW: Healthcare's impact on climate change

Tempus AI shares surged 30% this week after Morgan Stanley highlighted reimbursement pricing that could add $330 million to $400 million in combined annual revenue across xT and xF diagnostics. CEO Eric Lefkofsky said Tempus will exceed its 25% multiyear growth target, with $200 million in Q2 data licensing bookings from AstraZeneca, GSK, and Merck. The Chicago-based precision medicine platform reported Q2 revenue of $382.49 million, up 21.6% year-over-year. Oncology testing volumes accelerated 31%. Tempus raised full-year guidance to $1.595 billion to $1.605 billion and reaffirmed adjusted EBITDA of about $65 million. Market capitalisation stands near $14.0 billion. Despite the rally, shares still trade below the $104 52-week high at $79.65.

Tempus AI announced plans to build a research platform containing 100,000 whole genomes linked to longitudinal clinical information over the next several years. The company aims to create the first de-identified multimodal whole-genome sequencing dataset focused on disease populations and patient outcomes, specifically optimized for AI-driven research. Once complete, Tempus plans to expand the effort towards one million genomes. The dataset will integrate into Tempus' existing multimodal data environment, allowing researchers to access genomic information alongside clinical histories, imaging, pathology and patient outcomes through Tempus Lens. The initial dataset is available through Tempus' Early Adopter Programme, with general availability planned for mid-2027. Tempus has previously established one of the largest multimodal real-world oncology databases, supporting hundreds of drug development decisions.