Contract awards are out for ADVOCATE, a federal push to put an autonomous AI agent on the heart failure care team. ARPA-H named the winning groups this week.
The program runs four years and is worth up to $62.7M. Up to $33.7M is committed in year one. Agency officials estimate the finished system could prevent hospitalizations and unlock $28B a year in savings across the heart failure population.
Atman Health will build a voice-first agent on an evidence-based clinical decision engine. Tempus won up to $9.5M and UpDoc up to $9.2M. Kaiser Permanente received up to $16M to study responsible use, and Duke University was also selected.
The agents are meant to check on patients between visits, adjust their questions on the fly and escalate to human clinicians when a case worsens. That matters most in the nearly half of US counties that have no practicing cardiologist.
The hard part is delivering an autonomous clinical agent that clears FDA review. ARPA-H has set a three-year approval target, and pairs model builders with health systems so the tools are validated inside real workflows rather than siloed pilots.
