Tempus AI has been selected to receive up to $9.5 million from the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health to develop and clinically validate an autonomous AI agent designed to help manage patients with heart failure.
The award comes through ARPA-H’s ADVOCATE program and will support development of an AI system intended to function as an extension of a clinical team, including the ability to deliver and coordinate aspects of cardiovascular care without direct human intervention.
Tempus plans to validate the technology through a multicenter prospective study.
The project addresses a large care gap. More than 6 million Americans live with heart failure, while fewer than 25% receive all guideline-recommended care, according to information cited by Tempus.
The company also noted that approximately 46% of U.S. counties have no practicing cardiologist.
Tempus’ proposed platform will continuously monitor both clinical and consumer-generated information, including electronic health records and home-based heart-rate monitoring.
A patient-facing autonomous agent would then help manage symptoms, medications, virtual rehabilitation and scheduling while connecting back into electronic health records to maintain documentation and coordination.
The system will build on several existing Tempus AI products.
Those include Olivia, an agentic patient concierge for organizing multimodal health information; Tempus Next, which has screened more than 2.7 million cardiology patients for care gaps; and three FDA-cleared ECG-AI products designed to proactively identify risk for undiagnosed cardiovascular diseases.
The ARPA-H project could represent an important step beyond AI systems that merely surface clinical recommendations by testing whether agentic systems can safely coordinate portions of patient care on a continuous basis.
KEY QUOTES:
“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.”
Brandon Fornwalt, M.D., Ph.D., Senior Vice President of Cardiology at Tempus
