Artificial intelligence and software company Commure has launched a suite of AI agents designed to automate complex tasks and tackle front-office functions, along with patient navigation, care management and revenue cycle.
The company says its Commure Agents function with full electronic health record integration and are embedded in the entire clinical workflow.
The AI assistants build off the company's full-stack AI platform, which spans revenue cycle management, ambient AI clinical documentation and workflows and practice management solutions.
"Agents are clearly the next evolution of how people are using language models," Tanay Tandon, CEO of Commure, told Fierce Healthcare in an interview previewing the new agents.
Commure Agents automate and streamline key healthcare operations – from patient engagement to care coordination and billing. They handle routine tasks such as answering calls, scheduling appointments, providing patient updates, and managing referrals or prior authorizations, according to the company. The agents can automate preoperative coordination, discharge planning and follow-ups.
As one example of how the agents tie in with Commure's AI solutions, Tandon describes a physician conducting a medical visit with a patient using Commure's ambient AI scribe. "The LLM is transcribing that. It's summarizing it, extracting relevant clinical context, generating documentation. But with agents, we can take it one step further, which is actually drive action after the appointment," he said.
If the patient has been recommended for colonoscopy, there's an entire prep regimen that's associated with that procedure. "The agent can interact with the source material and interact with the EMR, and can also interact directly with the patient over voice and can take on all of that follow-up," he said. "This relieves burden, while also engaging very seamlessly with our co-pilots like like ambient."
The agents also can handle back-office administrative functions such as prior authorization, triggered from that ambient patient-doctor conversation, he noted.
Commure Agents also are designed to streamline claims processing, reduce denial rates by correcting errors, and flag inefficiencies in the revenue cycle.
The company is offering pre-built AI agents and the capability for health systems to build their own agents, Tandon noted.
"We have a series of pre-built ones that we actually use in our own revenue cycle business. The way that we often develop these is they're meant to solve our own visceral pains when we're running RCM end-to-end for a customer: denials, prior auths, follow-ups, patient texts, explaining an EOB and why a bill is what it is. These are all things that humans used to do, and now LLMs do for us within our RCM business, and then we turn those into modules that we can deploy within a health system," Tandon said.
He added, "We also have a forward-deployed engineering team that can get on site and adapt these or even add entirely new workflows for a given system, and really co-develop a partnership with them."
Tandon asserts that Commure is building a unified platform for AI solutions. "Commure Agents move beyond copilots and are pioneering the shift to true autopilots, where routine healthcare workflows run seamlessly in the background. They reduce the need for constant clicks, prompts, or human intervention," he said. "Unlike copilots that rely on human input at every turn, autopilots—Commure Agents—operate independently, delivering real automation that saves time, reduces errors, and lets care teams focus on what matters most: patients.”
The agents have been deployed at several health systems and the company contends the technology has already delivered measurable improvements in clinician satisfaction, documentation speed and operational efficiency.
Commure's ambient AI solution has been added to Epic's Toolbox, which highlights software categories with recommended practices for integration and the third-party apps that follow those recommendations. Commure's ambient AI is integrated with Epic Haiku.
The company just picked up $200 million in growth financing from General Catalyst’s customer value fund to fuel its sales and marketing efforts.
Through its CVF, General Catalyst pre-funds a company’s sales and marketing budget, according to a GC blog post.
Commure will use the funding to accelerate its full-stack AI platform, which spans revenue cycle management, ambient AI clinical documentation and workflows and practice management solutions.
As AI technology evolves, health tech companies are rapidly developing AI agents to tackle administrative tasks and act as medical assistants. Venture capital investors see the opportunities and are pouring money into many of these startups.
"The analogy I love using is when word processors first came out, in the '80s and the '90s, there was a whole bunch of little companies and point solutions that had popped up. There was a company that all it did was grammar check. This was a really fast-growing company. All the VCs and PE firms at the time loved it and then the company died, the minute Microsoft introduced word processors that would grammar check and other related capabilities within their word processor natively. I think that's the way that a lot of standalone agents are going to go," he said.
He continued, "Our belief is that there's two centers of gravity in a health system or practice. One is the EMR, and the number two is the CFO's office, which is revenue cycle. All of our agents are really built around that revenue cycle core, in the sense that we believe that if they're offered as part of a platform, either as a full cycle RCM solution that competes with an R1 or an athenahealth in a critical platform module that all the builders in the practice use, you can launch agents much faster, and they're almost features. They're independent features that are part of a larger product, rather than the product itself."
The company plans to continue building out its AI agent stack, Tandon said, noting that there are "infinite applications."
"Our goal is, can we make it really easy and fast to deploy those apps for RCM or physician productivity, intake, referral, prior auth, denials, these are all modules that are growing very quickly for us and then obviously continuing to grow ambient. Sometimes the simplest tool is often the highest leverage. More doctors than not still don't use ambient in American healthcare, and adoption is probably sub 20% at this point in time. So we'll continue to nail implementation training and using that as a good wedge to launch other agentic products," he said.