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ARPA-H selects 6 teams for agentic cardiovascular AI program

ARPA-H awarded six contracts to develop autonomous AI agents that can adjust cardiac care plans without human cardiologist oversight as part of its ADVOCATE program.

Anuja Vaidya
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Published: 10 Sep 2026

Even as experts underscore the importance of human oversight in the age of AI, the government is accelerating efforts to create AI for cardiac care that does not require a human cardiologist.

The Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health has officially launched its Agentic AI-EnableD CardioVascular CAre TransfOrmation, or ADVOCATE, program, selecting six teams to participate. The program aims to create the world's first clinical agentic AI system that can serve as a member of cardiac patients' clinical team.

Initially announced in January 2026, the ADVOCATE program will support the development of clinical AI agents that can autonomously adjust appointment, medication, diet and exercise plans, as well as a supervisory AI system to monitor the clinical AI agents once deployed to ensure safety and efficacy.

"Agentic AI, which can autonomously plan and execute specific tasks, represents a massive opportunity for democratizing healthcare access," said ARPA-H Director Alicia Jackson, Ph.D., in the January press release. "ADVOCATE will allow patients to ask questions about their heart health and get reliable support and clinical interventions, helping make this AI-powered future real for CVD and other chronic diseases and paving the way for FDA-authorized agentic tools for many other conditions."

Contract award winners span tech, health systems & universities

Teams from Atman Health, Tempus AI and Updoc received contract awards to develop clinical AI agents.

Atman Health will develop a large language model-based tool that can ask patients diagnostic questions to guide treatment adjustments, while Tempus AI will expand its Olivia patient health app to add continuous monitoring and clinical analysis on changes in patient health. Updoc will create a conversational clinical AI agentic system based on a rules system built by clinicians that evaluates every proposed action against approved protocols.

The companies must submit an FDA-authorization package for these within 24 months.

Stanford University received a contract award to develop the supervisory AI system. It plans to create a system that uses a three-stage pipeline, which includes outlier filtering, rule-based screening and a deep-research auditing agent, to detect unsafe recommendations and provide rationales for its decisions. 

In addition, ARPA-H has awarded contracts to two health systems to execute the implementation strategy for technology emerging from the ADVOCATE program.

Duke University will provide a multi-site validation platform for testing clinical AI agents across five health systems and rural sites on both Epic and Oracle EHRs. Meanwhile, Kaiser Permanente will deploy the agents across 21 medical centers and more than 260 clinics, embedding them into Epic EHR software workflows for heart failure patients. Kaiser will also create reusable deployment blueprints through shadow-mode deployments and pragmatic randomized clinical trials, that is, clinical trials that test efficacy in real-world conditions rather than controlled settings.

ADVOCATE program takes aim at CVD disease burden

By bringing AI advancements to cardiovascular care, ARPA-H aims to curb the leading cause of death in the U.S. According to the most recent data from the American Heart Association, nearly 1 million Americans died from cardiovascular disease in 2023.

From 2021 to 2023, nearly half of U.S. adults (48.9%) had some form of cardiovascular disease. However, as the need for cardiac care grows, there is an expected shortfall in the cardiologist workforce.

"What we are trying to achieve with ADVOCATE is a technology that can serve as a clinician-extender: an autonomous agent smart enough to understand a patient's treatment needs, capable of providing certain care autonomously, and equally capable of engaging the clinical team when needed," Haider Warraich, M.D., a practicing cardiologist and ADVOCATE's program manager, said in the press release. "This work will change how we practice medicine -- and it would not happen without ARPA-H driving the vision for the future."

The idea that AI can take on certain clinical tasks autonomously is gaining a foothold in the U.S. healthcare industry, with efforts such as Utah's AI prescribing pilot reporting promising early results. The pilot is testing whether Doctronic's AI system can renew prescriptions safely and accurately without clinician intervention. Human physicians agreed with the AI's prescription renewal recommendations in 91% of cases, the early results showed.

Still, industry groups that represent physicians insist that physicians remain central to healthcare AI tool development, deployment and oversight.

Anuja Vaidya has covered the healthcare industry since 2012. She currently covers healthcare IT and innovation, including artificial intelligence, digital healthcare, EHRs and interoperability.

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