Happy Friday, Hospitalogists! I teased this yesterday, but today's essay is a special one. I'm partnering with Lumeris to give you an inside look at their recent launch of Tom, the first AI-enabled primary care as a service. I hope you enjoy learning all about Tom as much as I did, and if you have more questions or you're interested in learning more about supercharging your primary care operation, give Lumeris a shout here. Let's dive in! |
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Meet Tom: AI-Enabled Primary Care as a Service, Built to Scale |
TL;DR - Tom is a multi-agent AI-enabled platform for primary care developed by Lumeris and announced this week. The Primary-Care-as-a-Service (PCaaS) launch is purpose-built for primary care physicians and operators across health systems, risk-bearing organizations, and to support all aspects of primary care delivery. Tom is supercharged by billions of clinical and non-clinical data points, handling everything from patient scheduling, to care coordination, to chronic disease management. Tom is the future of primary care.
Learn more about Tom here!
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Meeting Tom I walked into Lumeris' meeting room late Monday afternoon. The conference day at ViVE was winding down. Most folks had left for their various happy hours, leaving the true grinders of healthcare behind. As soon as I walked in the room, I immediately felt a palpable buzz. I mean, Dr. David Carmouche, EVP and Chief Clinical Transformation Officer, and Jean-Claude Saghbini, Lumeris' CTO and President, were practically beaming at me with pride at what they were about to unveil. The week prior, Lumeris had reached out to me, inviting me to a special meeting and preview of what would become their new AI-enabled primary care platform - Tom. I've been friendly with the Lumeris team for some time (shout out Rick), and their team has done great work - the right way - in value-based care, health system transformation, and primary care for decades. So when they reached out to me asking if I wanted a look behind the scenes at something new they'd been developing, I couldn't say no. So this post is all about what I discovered during that first-look meeting and demo. For Hospitalogists and anyone else reading this piece, here's what Tom is all about, and how Lumeris is solving the access and shortage problem in an area with extreme need: primary care.
Tom's Beginnings and the Primary Care Scale Problem
Lumeris holds two decades worth of experience working with health systems and risk-bearing organizations across the U.S. Over that time, they've accumulated best practices, discussed pain points with clients, and realized what's truly broken in our healthcare system today. Coupling these discussions with the emerging capabilities of AI, Lumeris figured it was time to develop its own tech solution to address a big problem for its customers. Not something incremental - something disruptive. Something that would actually move the needle, and have the potential to exponentially increase access to care. So the Lumeris team got to work on the small, simple goal of solving the looming primary care crisis. (Okay, definitely not small or simple). Hospitalogists know the talking points around primary care and why it's such a sore area of need. Reimbursement is getting crushed. Investment is lacking. Access is a problem. Yet ask anyone, and they'll tell you that primary care physicians (PCPs) are the backbone of our healthcare system. Saints who deserve better. Lumeris agrees. In identifying the primary care problem and level of need during its due diligence process, Lumeris estimated primary care capacity sits at around 500 million hours of time available for patients, across all primary care functions. |
But here's where the access problem comes into play. 100 million Americans don't have access to primary care today. There's a huge gap in both (1) access and (2) capacity. Even though 500 million hours seem like plenty, we really need close to 2 billion hours to close the access gap. Lumeris firmly believes this gap can be - and needs to be - closed with tech. The primary care problem, riddled with time wasted on administrative hours and the tough reality of economics involved, demands a tech solution. So, over the past 5 years, Lumeris has been steadily building that tech solution, resulting in Tom - a purpose-built platform for primary care. What is Tom? Agentic AI is here in 2025. Tom is a multi-agent PCaaS. Tom aggregates data, connecting billions of data points - from health systems, labs, pharmacies, claims data, CMS, HIE data, wearables, CGMs and even non-clinical publicly available consumer data - to create more complete patient records and computes the Best Next Action - determined by data-driven algorithms - for the patient within the context of its task. |
Most health tech tools tell care teams what needs to be done. Tom simply…does it. Instead of piling more tasks onto already overwhelmed providers, Tom works behind the scenes 24/7 to take action (and AI agents don't get tired, grumpy, or frustrated, either). Background tasks like scheduling a cancer screening or following up on medication adherence gets handled by Tom - not a care team, so they can focus on other pressing patient concerns. What else can Tom help with? Post-discharge check-ins, patient education, flagging urgent issues…Tom handles these as an extension of the PCP or care team, increasing touchpoints with the patient by orders of magnitude and all within a shared care plan, so nothing falls through the cracks. By embedding directly into primary care workflows, Tom doesn't just deliver insights; it acts on them. It pulls in real-time data, considers social determinants of health, follows clinical guidelines (including real-time integration with UpToDate), and personalized interventions, all while reducing the burden on care teams. The result? More engaged patients, less administrative chaos, and one step closer to those 2 billion hours of primary care. As you can imagine, the downstream hours saved and associated economic opportunity is significant as well. Think panel expansion, hundreds of more touchpoints with patients, more doctor facetime with patients, and all while delivering a better overall care experience. Tom in Action |
During the meeting, Jean-Claude walked the group and me through a live demo, where Tom (or his female counterpart, Carol - who together sound like a happily married All-American couple) called his phone and asked follow-up questions for a patient who had just been discharged after suffering from congestive heart failure. He asked Tom some silly questions like "can I double my medication to get better faster?" To which of course Tom replied no and to follow the prescription instructions. An easy example of where Tom really shines though, is in its ability to contextualize patient data into real-time conversations. For instance, Tom can call a patient for a follow-up to something unrelated, but see the patient has a history of depression and administer a PHQ-9. From non-clinical datasets, Tom can help a patient schedule a follow-up visit and ask if he or she needs a ride, since data might indicate the patient may need accommodations. These types of 'in between' interventions are an insanely cool step forward to create better patient experiences and allow PCPs and their care teams to do more with less. Tom handles the rest - it's the interconnected tissue enabling everything in the background. It's directly integrated into the EHR, scheduling interface, UpToDate, and more. On the LLM side, Tom was built by researching to 60+ LLMs with appropriate guardrails around clinical settings, hallucinations, and other compliance situations in place. Adding to this heavy focus on safety, Jean-Claude told me there's a team working around the clock to try and 'break' Tom - to find 'unhappy paths.' They run 260,000 test cases in their data pipeline and are relentlessly pursuing excellence. Tom's deployment to some of Lumeris' current health system customers is already happening - with plans for expansion from there. Let's get to work in primary care, Tom This kind of innovation is what we've been waiting for. 2025 is the year of agentic AI, and 2025 is also the year we see meaningful steps forward in innovation moving the needle within care delivery through revolutionary, category-defining platforms like Tom. To Lumeris, Tom is more than a simple 3 letter name. Its namesake comes from Tom Doerr, a Lumeris co-founder and an internist who was an inspiration - passionate about primary care with an insatiable focus on the patient. Tom the AI-powered solution honors the legacy and spirit of the late Tom Doerr. And just as Tom Doerr inspired people every day, Tom the primary care platform will transform the industry where it's needed most with the audacious, provocative goal of enabling all patients to have the same primary care access - and experience. |
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That's it for this week. Thanks for the read! Let me know what you thought by replying back to this email. — Blake |
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