Palo Alto, Calif. – September 15, 2026 -- UpDoc has been selected by the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) as lead performer in the Agentic AI-Enabled Cardiovascular Care Transformation (ADVOCATE) program, securing an award of up to $9.2 million. Microsoft, OpenAI and NVIDIA are joining the UpDoc-led team as supporting partners.
ARPA-H targets the first FDA-authorized autonomous clinical AI system, starting with heart failure management
The 39-month, multi-phase program aims to produce a reliable, FDA-authorized agentic AI system capable of autonomously managing heart failure, including medications, diet and exercise, functioning as a round-the-clock digital member of a patient's care team. No prior federal health research program has set out to build an autonomous clinical AI system intended for FDA authorization and real-world deployment. Performers advancing through competitive milestone evaluations gain access to independent verification and validation studies, benchmarking against cardiologists, clinical trials under FDA Investigational Device Exemption, and large-scale scalability studies with electronic health record integration inside partner health systems.
Cardiovascular disease costs the U.S. more than $400 billion annually and kills nearly one million Americans each year
Dr. Sharif Vakili, CEO and co-founder of UpDoc and a practicing primary care physician at Stanford Medicine, said medicine has long been constrained by the limited number of clinicians and hours available for patient care. He said ADVOCATE gives UpDoc a rigorous validation pathway to prove autonomous clinical AI can be trusted with the patients who need it most.
UpDoc already runs its clinical AI platform inside Cleveland Clinic, Allegheny Health Network and UCSF Health
UpDoc's current FDA-cleared insulin management system combines medical device functionality with conversational AI to operate within physician-prescribed treatment plans. The ARPA-H architecture extends that foundation toward a general-purpose clinical AI platform in which large language models reason over evolving patient data to select diagnostic, treatment and care-management actions inside UpDoc's proprietary Clinical Intelligence System, preserving physician oversight. This next-generation system has not been cleared by the FDA. ARPA-H Program Manager Haider Warraich said the agency is coordinating with the FDA and the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT, alongside health systems, medical societies, payers and technology firms, to build the regulatory, reimbursement and technical infrastructure required for clinical AI deployment. Continued participation in later ADVOCATE phases remains subject to competitive milestone evaluations.