Tempus Wins Up to $9.5 Million ARPA-H Award for Heart Failure AI Agent

Tempus AI, Inc. (TEM ) announced on September 9, 2026 that it has been selected by the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), an agency within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, to receive an award of up to $9.5 million to build what the company describes as the first autonomous clinical AI agent capable of providing safe and effective care to patients with heart failure.

The funding comes through ARPA-H’s ADVOCATE (Agentic AI-EnableD CardioVascular CAre TransfOrmation) program and will support development of the product as well as clinical validation of the AI system in a multi-center prospective study. Tempus said the initiative will produce an AI agent that functions as an extension of the clinician team and is capable of delivering and coordinating cardiovascular care without direct human intervention.

ARPA-H’s award directory lists the Tempus project under the title “TEMPUS ADVOCATE: A Tailored, Empathetic Multimodal Patient-facing Unified System for Cardiovascular Care,” with a directory entry dated September 8, 2026.

Proposed Agent Design and Existing Tempus Products

According to the company, the Tempus solution establishes continuous surveillance across both clinical data streams, such as electronic health records, and consumer-generated data streams, such as home-based heart rate monitors. This enables a platform featuring a patient-facing autonomous agent to manage symptoms, medications, virtual rehabilitation and scheduling, and the platform will connect back into the electronic health record to ensure documentation and coordination are accurate and consistent.

Tempus said the proposed agent builds directly on its existing suite of AI products. Those include Olivia, an agentic patient concierge that centralizes and organizes multimodal data from clinical histories; Tempus Next, a care-gap software product that has already screened more than 2.7 million cardiology patients, according to the company; and a portfolio of three FDA-cleared ECG-AI products designed to proactively identify risk of undiagnosed cardiovascular diseases.

In its own announcement of the performer teams, ARPA-H described the Tempus project as a clinical AI agentic system extending the existing Olivia patient health app, adding continuous monitoring with deeper clinical analysis when it detects meaningful changes in a patient’s health.

ADVOCATE Program Structure and Selected Teams

ARPA-H announced the teams receiving ADVOCATE contract awards on September 9, 2026, stating that its commitment is up to $33.7 million in the first year of the four-year, $62.7 million program. Tempus was selected in the program’s TA1 technical area, whose teams will develop a patient-facing clinical AI agentic system capable of autonomously supporting patients with heart failure between healthcare visits and escalating to the human care team. TA1 performers must submit an FDA-authorization package for the product within 24 months of contract award, according to ARPA-H.

The other TA1 performers are Atman Health, which is developing a clinical AI agentic system built on an evidence-based clinical decision engine with large language models behind a voice-first interface that adjusts on the fly to ask each patient the diagnostic questions most likely to be useful, and Updoc, whose system separates conversational intelligence from clinical authority through a clinician-built rules system that validates every proposed action against approved protocols before execution.

Stanford University is the program’s TA2 performer, developing a disease-agnostic supervisory AI system that will continuously monitor the TA1 clinical agents after deployment, detecting unsafe recommendations and out-of-distribution behavior in real time. ARPA-H said Stanford’s system uses a three-stage, compute-escalating pipeline of outlier filtering, rule-based screening, and a deep-research auditing agent that produces inspectable per-claim rationales.

The TA3 implementation performers are Duke University and Kaiser Permanente. Duke will provide a multi-site validation platform testing ADVOCATE agents across five health systems and rural sites on both Epic and Cerner/Oracle electronic health records, amplified by the American Heart Association’s national reach. Kaiser Permanente will provide an enterprise-scale deployment across 21 medical centers and more than 260 clinics, embedding ADVOCATE agents into Epic software workflows for heart failure patients and generating reusable deployment blueprints through shadow-mode deployments and pragmatic randomized clinical trials.

ARPA-H said it has contracted with the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory as its external evaluation partner to provide independent assessment of technical performance and clinical outcomes. The agency also said ADVOCATE will engage the U.S. Food and Drug Administration throughout the program lifecycle to develop the regulatory framework for this class of patient-facing clinical AI, and that selected performers will work with ARPA-H to establish shared evaluation standards, interoperability requirements, and reimbursement pathways.

Rick Abramson, M.D., Director of the FDA Digital Health Center of Excellence, said in the ARPA-H announcement that patient-facing agentic AI is one of the most consequential frontiers in digital health and that getting the regulatory framework right requires close, iterative collaboration between developers, clinicians, and the FDA.

More than 6 million Americans live with heart failure, and nearly half die within five years of diagnosis, according to Tempus’ announcement. The company said less than 25 percent of patients with heart failure receive all guideline-recommended care, citing a JACC: Heart Failure study by Jing et al., and that nearly 46 percent of U.S. counties lack a single practicing cardiologist.

“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.”

On the ADVOCATE program page, ARPA-H states that more than 200,000 Americans die each year from preventable impacts of cardiovascular disease, the leading cause of death in the country, and that the U.S. spends almost half a trillion dollars on heart disease annually while experiencing much worse outcomes than many similar nations. In its awards announcement, the agency said that if the program succeeds, ADVOCATE will save lives, reduce preventable hospitalizations, and generate an estimated $28 billion in annual cost savings across the heart failure population alone.

“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,” said ADVOCATE Program Manager Haider Warraich, M.D., a practicing cardiologist.

ARPA-H first announced the ADVOCATE program on January 13, 2026, according to the program’s news listing. The agency said performers across the technical areas will work closely together to develop technical interfaces, safety benchmarks, and evaluation protocols throughout the program.