UpDoc awarded up to $9.2 million under ARPA-H’s ADVOCATE program to develop and validate an autonomous clinical AI system intended for future FDA authorization and real-world deployment, starting in cardiovascular disease

PALO ALTO, Calif., Sept. 9, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — UpDoc, an enterprise-ready clinical AI company developing physician-grade agentic AI, today announced it has been selected by the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) as a lead performer in the Agentic AI-Enabled Cardiovascular Care Transformation (ADVOCATE) program, with an award of up to $9.2 million. Microsoft, OpenAI and NVIDIA join supporting the UpDoc-led team.

Cardiovascular disease costs the U.S. more than $400 billion each year, underscoring an urgent need for more proactive and scalable approaches to prevention and care. As a lead performer in ARPA-H’s ADVOCATE program, UpDoc will direct the development of advanced cardiovascular disease management with its clinical AI platform, enabling health systems to extend proactive, personalized care to patients who lack access to specialty care and may otherwise miss critical opportunities for intervention.

“Nearly one million Americans die from cardiovascular disease each year, many as a result of critical gaps in our current care model,” said Dr. Sharif Vakili, CEO and co-founder of UpDoc and practicing primary care physician at Stanford Medicine. “Medicine has always been constrained by the number of clinicians and the hours they have in their day dedicated to patient care. ADVOCATE is the federal government’s commitment to engineering past that constraint and ensuring access to care. We are honored to be selected by ARPA-H to lead this work. Our platform already supports continuous, personalized care under physician oversight at some of the nation’s premier health systems. This program gives us the opportunity, and the rigorous validation pathway, to prove that autonomous clinical AI can be trusted with the patients who need it most.”

The ADVOCATE program will support the development of clinical AI agents that can be trusted to autonomously manage heart failure, including managing medications, diet and exercise. The program’s transformative goal is to create a first-of-its-kind, reliable, U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) authorized clinical agentic AI system that serves around the clock as a new, digital member of a patient’s clinical care team. No federal health research program has previously set out to produce an autonomous clinical AI system intended for FDA authorization and real-world deployment.

“ADVOCATE represents an unprecedented level of coordination across the federal health enterprise,” said Haider Warraich, MD, Program Manager, ARPA-H. “ARPA-H is working alongside the FDA and the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC), together with health systems, medical societies, payers, and technology companies, to ensure access to care and build the regulatory, reimbursement, and technical foundation that clinical AI requires. Rather than developing technology and hoping the system adapts, the program is updating the infrastructure of American healthcare so that safe, validated clinical AI has a clear path to patients.”

The program is structured as a 39-month, multi-phase effort in which performers that advance through competitive milestone evaluations gain access to a fully funded pathway from prototype to real-world clinical use. That pathway includes independent verification and validation studies, benchmarking agent performance against cardiologists and clinical trials conducted under FDA Investigational Device Exemption. It also includes large-scale scalability studies deployed within partner health systems, with electronic health record integration, comparing agent-enabled care to usual care. For performers that reach the end of the program, ARPA-H will have funded the clinical evidence generation and deployment infrastructure that has been the largest barrier to bringing transformative technology to patients.

With initial deployments already underway at premier healthcare systems, including Cleveland Clinic, Allegheny Health Network (AHN) and UCSF Health, UpDoc’s platform expands the capacity of care teams to enable personalized, high-touch care.

“Too many patients lack timely access to specialty cardiovascular care, leading to delayed interventions and poorer health outcomes,” said Thomas Osborne, Chief Medical Officer, Microsoft Federal. “ADVOCATE reflects a bold vision from ARPA-H to bring together healthcare, regulatory, and technology leaders to discover the most effective ways to safely extend the reach and capabilities of care teams, with the ultimate goal of improving patient outcomes. Microsoft is proud to support ARPA-H and UpDoc in advancing responsible, rigorously validated AI that can help improve patient outcomes and expand access to high-quality cardiovascular care, wherever they live.”

UpDoc’s current FDA-cleared insulin management system combines medical device functionality with conversational AI to support care within physician-prescribed treatment plans and defined clinical boundaries.

The ARPA-H architecture represents the next evolution of UpDoc’s technology, laying the foundation for a future general-purpose clinical AI platform. It is designed to enable an agentic clinical system in which advanced large language models could actively reason over evolving patient data and select appropriate diagnostic, treatment and care-management actions.

These decisions would occur within UpDoc’s proprietary Clinical Intelligence System, which preserves physician oversight and establishes clinical safeguards. The intended result is an architecture designed to bring the flexibility, judgment and multi-step reasoning of modern AI to complex clinical care, while maintaining the safety, auditability and governance required for real-world clinical use. This next evolution of UpDoc’s technology has not been cleared by the FDA.

Through the ADVOCATE program, UpDoc will engage with ARPA-H, FDA, and other program stakeholders as it addresses the technical, regulatory, and market challenges associated with bringing advanced clinical AI into real-world care. Continued participation in later phases of the ADVOCATE program is subject to competitive milestone evaluations.

Discover how UpDoc’s clinical AI platform is transforming how chronic care is delivered at www.updoc.ai.

About UpDoc

UpDoc is an enterprise-ready clinical AI company pioneering a new care delivery paradigm that enables patients to receive continuous, physician-level care between scheduled visits. UpDoc’s provider-integrated platform combines automated agentic AI with clinician oversight to safely manage chronic disease at scale, bringing proactive, high-touch care to every patient in a way that was never possible before. For more information, visit https://updoc.ai/.

Media Contact:

Abbey Clark
120/80 GROUP for UpDoc
631-834-1070
press@updoc.ai

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SOURCE UpDoc