Not-for-profit health system Sentara Health is moving beyond administrative automation to test artificial intelligence-powered clinical care directly during primary care visits.
The health system is working with GW RhythmX, a health AI and patient engagement company, to roll out a pilot program testing AI-powered precision care within clinician workflows.
GW RhythmX, formed through the 2025 merger of RhythmX AI and Get Well, offers generative and predictive AI-powered assistants that support physician decision-making. The company says its precision care platform provides relevant clinical, operational and patient-specific insights at the point of care, helping clinical care teams deliver more personalized and coordinated care while reducing the administrative burden of searching through fragmented sources of information.
Sentara Health operates 12 hospitals and more than 400 sites of care in Virginia and Northeast North Carolina and brought in $14.2 billion in operating revenue in 2025. The system has approximately 473 primary care physicians and advanced practice providers at Sentara Medical Group.
"We're really redesigning our ambulatory care model around a simple question: How are we going to give our clinicians and care teams greater capacity and capability to care for increasingly complex populations as the populations age? That was the impetus for why we're redesigning care here through something called care model redesign and how we think RhythmX AI could be a key technology-enabled solution for us," Mohanty told Fierce Healthcare in an exclusive interview about the pilot initiative.
The demand for primary care continues to grow as clinician capacity remains constrained, he noted. Sentara Health is developing a team-based approach to maximize the use of physicians, APPs, nurses, pharmacists and care managers combined with AI tools and telehealth to increase access to care without straining the workforce.
The model is intended to match patients with the right clinician at the right time while enabling care teams to work at the top of their capabilities.
"We're looking at RhythmX AI to augment that model by reducing not only administrative burden but the cognitive burden," Mohanty said.
"Healthcare is reaching an inflection point," said Deepthi Bathina, CEO and founder of GW RhythmX. "Health systems are redesigning care models to improve access, support increasingly complex patient populations, and empower clinicians to practice at the top of their licenses. The challenge is ensuring those models can be consistently executed across every patient encounter. We believe AI-powered precision care can help bridge the gap between strategy and execution by delivering the right intelligence to the right clinician at the right moment."
GW RhythmX's clinical recommendation technology provides next-best-action decision support and can help operationalize these next-generation care models. The company's precision care platform analyzes patient history, evidence-based guidelines, care gaps, social and financial determinants, payer requirements, formulary considerations, and other relevant clinical data to provide personalized recommendations during the patient encounter.
The personalized data contained within the RhythmX AI platform also enables more precise navigation and orchestration of care delivery, according to executives.
The market is already crowded with ambient AI and clinical decision support tools. GW RhythmX says its platform provides specific clinical recommendations that incorporate evidence-based guidelines, along with health system and payer guidelines, that are hyper-personalized to the patient. The AI tool consolidates and presents the data and provides the reasoning behind its recommendations in a way that's easy for clinicians to assess, according to company executives.
"The whole data provenance is served up to [clinicians] on a platter to see exactly the transparency, the explainability. The end-to-end data is shown, if they wanted to see so they can make a decision within seconds," Bathina said.
Sentara Health's pilot of GW RhythmX's primary care AI assistant will begin deliberately small with 30 physicians and APPs working in family and internal medicine across two markets and phase one of the project will last 90 days, according to information provided by the health system.
"We want to learn first before we scale," Mohanty noted. Sentara will use the pilot to evaluate how clinicians interact with the technology, the level of clinician adoption and trust, whether its recommendations are useful at the point of care and how well the AI integrates into existing workflows before the health system considers a broader rollout.
Mohanty's team will also assess whether clinicians follow the recommendations and if the AI tool drives meaningful clinical actions for patients.
"If the results demonstrate value, and I'm pretty hopeful and confident that it will, the logical next question is how do we expand across primary care, and then potentially to other ambulatory settings. I see use cases in many other settings outside of primary care, but we are testing it in primary care where the cognitive load is pretty high," he said.
As part of the pilot initiative, a control group of clinicians will undergo optimization using Sentara tools currently available. A pilot of Sentara’s primary care redesign team-care model will run in parallel with the AI initial deployment so the impact of each can be analyzed separately. The plan is to integrate them as they are scaled, health system executives said.
Ambient AI has already delivered significant value by reducing clinicians' documentation burden, freeing up time for clinicians, Mohanty said. The AI pilot with GW RhythmX takes the next step by going beyond note-taking to generate patient-specific clinical recommendations.
Sentara evaluates AI tools through a formal governance process that ensures new technologies are scalable, safe, compliant and clinician-centered, with a focus on reducing burden, supporting care teams and maintaining human oversight. The health system can also work as a co-development partner with GW RhythmX to shape the next iteration of the platform, Mohanty noted.
New Mexico-based Presbyterian Healthcare Services is also deploying the company's AI platform for primary care clinicians. That project rolled out in December at several of the health system's primary care clinics. That pilot program demonstrated clear impact by surfacing critical patient conditions, the health system said, delivering 17,000 hyper-personalized treatment responses, and reducing hours of manual data hunting for clinicians. Presbyterian has since rolled out the precision care platform to 200 primary care physicians.
GW RhythmX's solutions are deployed across more than 150 health systems, reaching over 85 million patients, including 8 million U.S. military veterans. The company has completed more than 170,000 physician-reviewed clinical validations to date, with physician-led governance and quality assurance built into its recommendations, executives said. The company is also expanding its platform to more specialties, including cardiology, endocrinology and inpatient.
Fast-growing healthcare AI startups Abridge, OpenEvidence and many other players are shifting to AI-driven clinical decision support, aiming to be an AI copilot for clinicians. Bathina says GW RhythmX has proven its value with health systems at scale. She pointed to an internal study conducted with Presbyterian that evaluated 1,100 patients over six months and tracked AI-identified conditions through adjudicated claims. The evaluation validated that the platform's clinical intelligence supported $1.1 million in condition capture.
"That would be enormous at scale if you multiplied it. That's not just about appropriate revenue for the health system, but imagine all the lives that were improved," she said.
GW RhythmX is backed by the private investment firm SymphonyAI Group. SAIGroup orchestrated the RhythmX AI and Get Well merger last year to leverage the best of both companies’ AI expertise and expand its reach among health systems. SAIGroup is backed by a $1 billion commitment from founder and CEO Romesh Wadhwani, and it invests in enterprise AI software companies. Its portfolio includes SymphonyAI, which is used in retail, financial services and other industries, as well as clinical AI and real-world data company ConcertAI.