5 Key Insights About AI and Healthcare from HIMSS25

Today, we are launching Commure CoLab nationwide—a dedicated innovation lab where hospitals partner directly with Commure engineers to co-develop, test, and deploy customized, AI-powered solutions quickly. Instead of waiting months (or years) for off-the-shelf software to be configured, hospitals part of Commure CoLab get custom-built, deeply integrated solutions designed for their exact needs in just weeks.

The first cohort of CoLab partnerships are with  top healthcare systems like HCA, Tenet, UHS, Children’s Cincinnati, and Sutter Health, with support from HATCo. With these customers, Commure CoLab is tackling high-priority operational challenges with speed and impact. Now, we’re expanding nationwide and will accept five CoLabs per cohort, every six months.
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Let’s Collaborate

Why We Created Commure CoLab

For too long, hospitals have had to adapt their workflows to fit vendor software. Many health systems invest in technology solutions only to find that they require extensive customization, complex integrations, and costly workarounds just to make them functional. Meanwhile, procurement cycles are slow, implementation takes months (or years), and by the time a solution is fully rolled out, it’s often already outdated.

With Commure CoLab, we flip that model. Instead of selling off-the-shelf software that hospitals need to adjust their workflows around, we co-develop AI-powered solutions that are built specifically for their challenges and seamlessly integrate into their existing EMR and operational systems.

What makes CoLab different is the speed and depth of collaboration. Rather than going through a drawn-out RFP and vendor selection process, our engineers work side by side with hospital teams, designing and iterating in real time.

With CoLab, hospitals don’t just get a vendor—they get a true technology partner, ensuring that what we build together is meaningful, measurable, and rapidly deployable.

How CoLab Works

The process is simple, fast, and risk-free:

1️⃣ Discovery Call – We meet for a 60-minute consultation to understand your hospital’s biggest challenges and assess fit.

2️⃣ Onsite Innovation Sprint – Our engineers come onsite for a full week, working alongside your team to build and integrate a working prototype.

3️⃣ Demo & Value Showcase – We present the solution in action, showing how it improves efficiency, reduces costs, or enhances patient care.

4️⃣ Pilot – We provide a 60-day pilot for you to try the co-developed solution.

5️⃣ Launch – If the solution drives results, hospitals can transition into full deployment with confidence. We support all staff training, further feature development, and drive adoption until your KPI targets are met.

The First CoLab Cohort

The first Commure CoLab Cohort proved that when hospitals and engineers work together, real, measurable impact happens fast. Some of the AI-powered solutions we’ve built include:

AI Search & Summarization – Instantly surfaces key clinical information from EMRs, reducing physician workload and cognitive overload.

Automated AI Appeals – Generates high-quality denial appeal letters automatically, helping Tenet recover lost revenue and reduce manual processing time.

AI-Powered Referrals – Automates and intelligently routes patient referrals, cutting administrative burden and ensuring faster patient access to specialists.

These initiatives aren’t just pilots—they’re ongoing solutions delivering measurable ROI by improving efficiency, reducing costs, and optimizing hospital operations. With a continuous feedback loop in place, we refine and enhance their impact in real time.

Building the Future of Healthcare, Together‍

Commure CoLab is redefining how hospitals adopt technology—faster, smarter, and fully customized. No more waiting years for solutions that only partially fit. With CoLab, hospitals get custom AI-powered automation, seamless integration, and real results in weeks.

With only five spots per cohort, every six months, we’re opening applications for hospitals looking to explore this model. Let’s build the future of healthcare together.
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APPLY FOR COLAB

Welcome to Commure Up Close! In this employee spotlight series, we sit down with team members from across Commure to learn about their backgrounds, perspectives on our company culture, and lives beyond work. Through these stories, we aim to provide a deeper look into why talented individuals choose Commure and how we work together to transform and simplify healthcare with cutting-edge technologies.

In this issue, we’re excited to highlight Mick Majewski, an Enterprise Account Executive who originally joined Athelas in July 2021 before it became a part of Commure.

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As a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up?

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Growing up I wanted to be a doctor, even going as far as becoming an EMT, tutoring organic chemistry, and studying for the MCAT. I ultimately got cold feet and pivoted to business (as many do). After graduating from Loyola University Chicago, I ended up in investment management, most recently at Goldman Sachs. The education I received there, combined with my early med school aspirations, lent itself well to healthcare enterprise sales, which is where I find myself today.

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What does an average day look like in your role?

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A great day for me is a calendar filled with back-to-back meetings. On the enterprise team we spend a lot of time traveling to meet with prospective clients. There’s really no substitute for in-person meetings. Day to day, I also work closely with my SDRs to develop prospecting strategies and spend any non-prospect or client-facing time building top of funnel.

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What made you ultimately decide to join Commure?

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Without a doubt, the mission-driven culture. Improving healthcare—both clinically and administratively—is incredibly fulfilling. I’ve had physicians tell me that their kids notice they’re not charting late into the night anymore and I've even had a few say they’ve postponed retirement after using our solutions. Helping physicians focus on patient care, improving patient outcomes, and increasing efficiency for health systems is a mission that I truly believe in. That’s what ultimately drew me to this company.

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Can you describe the products that you sell?

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Our team primarily focuses on the Commure AI Platform, delivering tailored solutions that address the unique clinical and administrative needs of health systems. At the heart of the platform is Commure Ambient AI, our ambient documentation solution, which integrates seamlessly into existing workflows across nearly every specialty, supporting providers in emergency departments, hospital settings, and outpatient clinics. We partner with leading enterprise health systems such as HCA and Tenet, as well as large FQHCs and multispecialty groups.

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How would you describe the Commure company culture?

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It’s a bootstrappy culture with immense opportunity. When I first joined, there were around 20 or 30 of us at the company. Now we are over 50x that size, but our culture remains the same - incredibly client-focused, fast-paced, and one of extreme ownership. Those who put in the work and are resourceful will succeed at Commure. 

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What advice would you give to someone on their first day at Commure?

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Talk to everyone. Build relationships with your teammates—not just in sales, but also in operations, clinical leadership, engineering, etc. The more you understand how all the pieces of our business fit together, the faster you’ll add value in prospect and client meetings. Because we’re not a point solution, there’s a lot to learn, but everyone here is more than happy to help.

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What are you most excited about for 2025 at Commure?

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Since I joined, the team has worked relentlessly to build the platform into what it is today. All that work has culminated into a product suite that is uniquely comprehensive and well-positioned to deliver value to our clients. Now more than ever we can help health systems effect change across the entire patient journey, which is an exciting position to be in.

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Explore Career Opportunities

Physicians spend a staggering 49% of their day and 37% of patient visit time in the EHR, according to the NIH. With screen time dominating these interactions, it’s no wonder 61% of physicians say bureaucratic tasks are the number one cause of burnout, according to a Medscape survey. Commure is transforming this reality with Commure Ambient AI, an advanced ambient intelligence solution designed to go far beyond just simple clinical documentation automation.

By seamlessly integrating with EHRs such as Epic, Meditech, Cerner, and many others, Commure Ambient AI allows healthcare providers to “go beyond the note”, enabling newfound efficiencies before, during, and after the visit via integrated coding, CDI, automated care nudges, and more.

Before the Visit: AI-Powered Clinical Prep
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Traditional documentation review forces providers to dig through endless charts, lab results, and imaging to find meaningful insights. Commure Ambient AI eliminates that manual burden by pre-surfacing the most relevant patient information from the EHR before the appointment begins.

• AI Patient Intake: Automatically ingests patients’ medical history, generates concise summaries, and integrates them into the EHR, dramatically reducing manual intake time.
• Contextual insights: The system identifies key clinical history, lab trends, and past diagnoses relevant to the visit.
• Reduced pre-charting time: Providers get a concise, AI-powered patient summary to guide their approach.

With this, physicians enter the visit already informed, minimizing redundant questioning and accelerating care decisions.

During the Visit: Beyond Basic Documentation Automation
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Even with the right data in hand, capturing clinical documentation remains a time-consuming challenge. Commure Ambient AI listens to the conversation in real time, extracting key clinical details, symptoms, and provider assessments to generate structured, editable notes with advanced features like:

• Real-time AI assistance: The system captures provider-patient conversations and converts them into structured, contextually relevant clinical notes.
• Clinical care nudges: Commure Ambient AI highlights potential next steps, helping physicians stay on top of clinical best practices without disrupting the flow of care during the appointment.
• Multilingual Support: Accurately transcribes and processes conversations in over 60 languages, accents, and dialects—ensuring inclusivity and precision in diverse clinical settings.

This ensures that providers spend less time typing and more time actually engaging with their patients.

After the Visit: Autonomous Coding Streamlines RCM
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Where most AI medical scribes start and end with the clinical note, Commure Ambient AI incorporates advanced RCM knowledge, while keeping clinicians and medical documentation specialists in the loop. Commure Ambient AI provides a pre-drafted clinical summary, taking into account previous denials and relevant information from the EHR. Physicians simply verify, edit, and attest.

• Autonomous Coding: Provides AI-driven CPT codes, ICD-10s, modifiers, and other quality measures.
• Human-attested validation: Providers retain full control over clinical documentation and coding, reducing the risk of errors.
• AI or Human Assisted: Available as a self-service pure-AI scribe or a dedicated medical documentation specialist with full clinical support before, during, and after the visit, with Commure Assist and Live offerings.
• Optimized for billing and compliance: Notes align with E/M coding guidelines, reducing claim denials and audit risks while ensuring proper reimbursement.
• Deep EHR Integrations: Commure Ambient AI seamlessly integrates with Epic, Meditech, Cerner, and many other EHRs, ensuring patient visit details are saved and able to be quickly surfaced for future visits or in the case of an audit.

As the system learns over time from previous denials, providers can finalize documentation faster, and reduce administrative burden while strengthening accuracy and compliance.

Delivering Better Outcomes for Providers, Organizations, and Patients
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By seamlessly integrating clinical documentation with other parts of healthcare operations, Commure Ambient AI drives measurable improvements across the ecosystem:

• Providers experience less burnout, improved workflow efficiency, and more face time with patients.
• Patients receive higher-quality, personalized care from more engaged, focused providers.
• Healthcare organizations using Commure Ambient AI have seen an average 81% reduction in documentation time, an average of 43 seconds to close a clinical note, and over a 25% reduction in claim denials, improving efficiency and financial performance.

“Using a platform like ours is going to lead to better, cheaper care for patients. It won’t matter who is taking care of you—you will know that the quality is going to be there.” — Dr. Alex Stinard, Chief Clinical AI Officer, Commure

In an era of rising costs, physician burnout, and increasing demand for efficient care, Commure Ambient AI represents the next generation of clinical documentation—turning medical decision-making into a seamless, intelligent, and patient-centered experience.

Find us at HIMSS25 booth #5839 to see Ambient AI in action!

AI is revolutionizing healthcare, and at HIMSS25, the future is here. Commure is leading this transformation and will be showcasing what innovations are shaping the next era of healthcare. Whether you're looking for insights on the latest AI technologies, real-world deployment strategies, or hands-on demos of our full suite of products, Commure has you covered.
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Find Commure at Booth #5839 to see how our AI-driven solutions are solving healthcare's most pressing challenges from clinician burnout to staff safety, and learn how innovations in AI-powered automation, interoperability, and real-time intelligence are helping healthcare providers focus on what matters most: their patients. We will be showcasing our full suite of products including:

• Strongline: Advance safety and operations with a market-leading, AI-powered staff duress and RTLS sensor suite.
• Ambient AI: Transform clinical documentation, incorporating advanced RCM knowledge, and tailoring workflows to each clinician’s needs.
• Engage: Elevate patient experiences with tools that foster better engagement, communication, and satisfaction.
• PatientKeeper: Empower clinicians with all-in-one AI-powered rounding, charting, and coding, seamlessly integrated into EHRs.
• RCM: Automate tedious operational processes and streamline every financial step of the patient encounter.
• RPM: Increase efficiency, resource saving, and patient experience with our remote patient monitoring capabilities.‍‍
• Agents: Automate complex tasks, dramatically simplifying patient experiences, clinician workflows, and administrative overhead.

We’d love to connect at HIMSS25 to discuss key issues facing your organization and share how Commure’s cutting-edge technology can help. Book a meeting with our team today.
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Reserve Your Spot

Commure executives will also be taking the stage in these must-attend sessions where they will unveil what the future of AI-driven healthcare looks like including strategic insights, real-world applications, and how to deploy AI at scale.

• Lead Your AI or It Will Be Leading You: Process Panel Discussion
  
  • Date & Time: Monday, March 3, 11:30 AM – 12:30 PM
  • Location: Venetian | Level 2 | Venetian F
  • Details: Commure CEO, Tanay Tandon, will join a panel of healthcare tech leaders from Cleveland Clinic, Kaiser Permanente Medical Group, and the Coalition for AI in Healthcare, for a discussion on AI adoption in healthcare, focusing on governance, data quality, and leadership strategies to ensure responsible AI integration. Attendees will gain insights from real-world case studies on implementing AI successfully. Event Details
• Innovate, Embed, Maximize: Advancing Healthcare with Forward Deployed Engineering
  
  • Date & Time: Tuesday, March 4, at 2:30 PM
  • Location: AWS Pavilion/Theater
  • Details: Commure’s Head of Forward Deployed Engineering, Max Krueger, will host a deep dive into Commure’s ambient AI suite and how forward-deployed engineering takes AI solution deployment the last mile for real-time impact for clinicians and health systems.
    
• Adaptable, Agentic, Affordable: Modern Enterprise Visibility
  
  • Date & Time: Wednesday, March 5, 3:00 PM – 3:20 PM
  • Location: AI Pavilion Theater‍‍
  • ‍Details: Commure’s Senior Vice President and General Manager, Dan Warner, will explore how AI-powered solutions, combined with lightweight hardware, are revolutionizing asset management, clinical workflow automation, and staff safety. This session will provide actionable insights on building smarter more cost-effective enterprise visibility into healthcare organizations. Event Details

In addition to our booth and stage presence, Commure will be featured at the MEDITECH booth, sharing live demos highlighting the collaborative work in interoperability and innovation between Commure and MEDITECH.

• Date & Time: Tuesday & Wednesday: 12:45 PM and 3:45 PM; Thursday: 11:45 AM and 2:45 PM
• Location: Booth C3318-02 in the HIMSS Interop & Smart Experience Pavilion
• Details: Commure's Chief Clinical AI Officer, Alex Stinard, MD, and Clinical Strategy Lead, Donald Lazure, PA, will demonstrate how Commure's cutting-edge solutions seamlessly integrate with MEDITECH Expanse—enhancing clinician workflows and improving patient care. For more information, check out MEDITECH’s official press release highlighting Commure and other partners’ presence at the MEDITECH booth.

We’d love to connect at HIMSS25 to discuss key issues facing your organization and share how Commure’s robust suite of AI-powered solutions can help. Book a meeting with our team today, we look forward to seeing you at the event!
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Reserve Your Spot

RCM decision-makers report a 90% usage rate of AI (versus 63% of IT decision-makers) and are also much more likely to see value in using AI in RCM (86% vs 52% of IT and 44% of executive/financial leaders). Despite these numbers, RCM leaders are rarely involved in steering technology choices from day one.

If enterprise health systems truly want to harness the full power of ambient AI, revenue cycle leaders must drive the conversation or risk rising coding errors, ballooning denials, and lost revenue.

Commure’s Chief Strategy Officer, Ian Shakil, joined a panel of ambient speech technology leaders at the 2024 Revenue Cycle Summit to discuss this critical aspect of ambient AI adoption.

Why RCM Leaders Must Be at the Forefront of Ambient AI Adoption

Revenue cycle leaders stand at the intersection of patient care and financial viability, yet too often they’re left out of early conversations about ambient AI solutions. When these tools are selected purely to reduce clinician “pajama time,” crucial requirements for coding, compliance, and reimbursement may be overlooked. Inadequate or imprecise documentation means additional work on the back end for RCM teams, higher rates of denials, and missed revenue opportunities.

By having RCM leaders participate in solution vetting from the outset, health systems can ensure that coding awareness, denial prevention, and payer criteria are woven into the product’s workflow. Clinicians can then focus on accurate documentation with the help of subtle nudges from ambient AI at the point of care, and allow revenue cycle teams to focus on optimizing reimbursement rather than retroactively fixing issues. This proactive collaboration ultimately positions RCM leaders as strategic partners who help unlock the full value of ambient AI technology.

Key Criteria for Evaluating Ambient AI Solutions

Selecting an ambient AI platform isn’t just about automating note-taking; it’s about building a foundation that supports efficient clinical documentation and robust revenue cycle outcomes. Here are three non-negotiable factors RCM leaders should demand from any potential vendor:

Intelligence & Contextual Awareness

A truly “intelligent” system goes beyond transcribing conversation. It should ingest past patient history, relevant diagnoses, and contextual cues in real time, ensuring each note is precise and complete. By nudging clinicians to document specific details—like HCC codes or modifiers—combining ambient AI with RCM preempts downstream queries and boosts coding accuracy.

Metrics & ROI

Time savings for clinicians may spark initial excitement, but RCM leaders need solid evidence of financial gains. Evaluate solutions by how they impact CDI query rates, decrease denials, and increase average reimbursement per visit. The more granular these metrics, the easier it is to pinpoint exactly where the AI is driving revenue capture and where adjustments may be needed.

Scalability & Flexibility

From multiple specialties to multiple languages, modern health systems are complex. A solution must adapt to varied care settings and be versatile enough to accommodate hospital inpatient needs, outpatient clinics, and everything in between. When growing or shifting payment models health systems require a platform that can scale rather than a rigid point solution that only works for a single slice of operations.

Measuring Success and Tracking ROI

Ambient AI solutions can transform clinician workflows—but without clear metrics, it’s tough to pinpoint precisely how much value they add. Here are three key areas to focus on and ensure all stakeholders are bought into before moving forward with a solution:

Clinical & Financial Data

Time savings, while important for reducing burnout, must be linked to clear revenue cycle improvements. Some health systems track metrics like average additional reimbursement per visit, while others focus on the uptick in the number of patients scheduled per week. Tying productivity gains to financial outcomes—rather than just survey data—is crucial for securing ongoing support and expansion of ambient AI initiatives.

Service Line–Specific Measurements

Every specialty has different coding, documentation, and quality requirements. In primary care, it may be about capturing HCC codes and add-on services. In the ED, a major focus could be critical care capture. Meanwhile, value-based care programs hinge on proper HCC re-capture and closing care gaps. RCM leaders should expect vendors to offer specialized metrics that reflect each department’s unique workflows and financial goals.

Clinician Burnout & Patient Experience

Ambient AI’s impact goes well beyond any single encounter. One of the largest contributors to clinician burnout is excessive documentation. By easing the after-hours charting burden, ambient AI enables providers to stay focused on patient care rather than note-taking. At the same time, patients benefit from more engaged face-to-face interactions. Tracking improvements in staff satisfaction, lower turnover rates, and positive patient feedback confirms that the technology not only boosts revenue capture but also enhances the overall care experience.

Looking Ahead: The Future of RCM in a Post-AI World

Ambient AI has moved beyond simple note-taking. The next phase of innovation will blend documentation, coding, and even payer interactions into seamless workflows, making RCM activities more automated and less burdensome. Over time, health systems may see real-time prior authorizations, near-instant claim adjudication, and more accurate risk adjustment—all fueled by increasingly “invisible” yet powerful AI-driven assistance. Rather than merely amplifying the status quo, leaders must challenge their technology vendors to reimagine care delivery and reimbursement in a way that unlocks new levels of efficiency and precision.

For revenue cycle leaders, this future points to a strategic pivot. Ambient AI solutions that were initially championed for clinician well-being are now demonstrating measurable business impact, with the potential to reshape how financial risk is managed. Yet these tools will only fulfill their promise if RCM teams drive the conversation, insist on measurable ROI, and ensure that solution providers are fully aligned with both clinical and financial objectives.

Discover the future of healthcare, powered by Commure. Trusted by some of the largest health systems including Tenet, Adventist, and Sutter Health, the Commure platform not only has deeply integrated RCM and ambient AI solutions, but a whole host of other products including staff duress, patient engagement, and RPM. Speak with one of our product experts today to learn more.
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Discover the Future of Healthcare

Today, we’re thrilled to introduce Commure Agents — intelligent, customizable assistants that automate complex tasks, dramatically simplifying patient experiences, clinician workflows, and administrative overhead. Agents can automate voice calls with patients, run manual tasks in electronic medical records (EMRs) automatically, analyze a dataset, generate documents and more!

Commure Agents will redefine how hospitals operate—eliminating inefficiencies, reducing provider burnout, and delivering high-quality patient care.

What are Commure Agents?

Commure Agents are powerful LLM systems designed to streamline experiences for healthcare administrators, clinicians and patients. Think of them as a virtual colleague who can handle routine documentation, retrieve and summarize patient data, draft patient notes, and even conduct preliminary analyses. It’s always learning, always available, and constantly improving to support you throughout your day.

Powered by advanced natural language processing (NLP) and integrated with leading Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems, Commure Agents are ready to seamlessly fit into your existing clinical environment and across every department.

Scheduling — Listen to Sophia help a patient schedule their appointment:

Clinical — Listen to Maria help prepare a patient for their upcoming colonoscopy:

Billing — Listen to Julia explain a copay to a patient and take payment over the phone:

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Commure Agents Use Cases

Commure Agents offer dozens of integration use cases out-of-the-box. Additionally, through our “forward deployed engineering” program, which embeds our engineers on-site with your team to develop solutions collaboratively, the number of use cases made available with Commure Agents is limitless.

Agents span the entire hospital across administrative, clinical, financial, and operational areas to cover a wide variety of high-value use cases for healthcare systems. Here is look at a few use cases in-depth:

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Patient Navigation

• AI Call Center Agent: Handles patient and insurance company calls autonomously, completing tasks like appointment confirmations, billing inquiries, and pre-authorizations.
• Scheduling Agent (Commure Sherpa): Manages patient appointment scheduling, resolves conflicts, and optimizes calendars for providers.
• Patient Outreach Agent: Sends reminders, educational materials, and real-time updates to patients about appointments, medications, or lab results

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Care Management

• Referral Management Agent: Tracks and processes patient referrals, automating follow-ups with external providers or specialists.
• Prior Authorization Agent: Automates prior authorization requests for procedures, medications, or tests by interacting with payers.
• Discharge Planning Agent: Generates personalized discharge instructions and coordinates follow-up workflows for patients.

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Revenue Cycle Management

• Revenue Cycle Optimization Agent: Identifies inefficiencies in the revenue cycle and suggests improvements for better financial outcomes.
• Claims Processing Agent: Submits, tracks, and reconciles insurance claims, ensuring faster reimbursements.
• Denials Autopilot Agent: Identifies rejected claims, finds errors, and resubmits claims to reduce denial rates and boost revenue.

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Benefits of Commure Agents

• Purpose-Built for Healthcare: Commure Agents are specifically designed and trained for the complexities of medical practice. It “understands” medical jargon, workflows, and compliance requirements.
• Easy Integration: Commure Agents integrate into your existing EHR and software ecosystem, allowing you to access its capabilities right from the systems you already use every day.
• Real-Time Assistance: Whether you need a patient’s medication history, a quick consult on relevant guidelines, or a concise summary of complex data, Commure Agents deliver it instantly—no waiting, no back-and-forth.
• Secure & Compliant: Healthcare data security and patient privacy come first. Commure Agents are built with strict adherence to HIPAA and other regulatory frameworks, ensuring your data remains secure.

Get Started with Forward Deployed Engineering

‍We can’t wait for you to see how Commure Agents transform the way you work.If you’re an existing customer and you’d like to get started with Commure Agents, reach out to your customer success manager. They can help you engage our forward deployed engineering team to collaborate on addressing your Agent needs. If you’re not yet a customer, but you’re interested in learning more. Fill out the following form and someone from Commure will reach out to you in order to understand your needs.

Recently I authored a Viewpoint in JAMA Oncology with Dr. Louis Potters, Chair of Radiation oncology at Northwell Health on the promise and opportunity to advance cancer care through greater adoption of Patient-reported outcomes (PROs) into clinical practice. 

Patient-reported outcomes (PROs) have shown transformative potential in oncology care. Research consistently highlights their ability to improve patient quality of life, reduce hospitalizations, and even extend survival rates. Yet, despite these benefits, PROs remain underutilized in clinical practice, primarily due to technological limitations, clinician skepticism, and change management challenges. For oncology to evolve, PROs must become a standard of care—and technology holds the key to overcoming these barriers.

The Proven Benefits of PROs

Studies have demonstrated the power of PROs to impact care outcomes. By enabling patients to report symptoms like pain, nausea, or fatigue in real-time, clinicians gain actionable insights that can prevent complications and reduce emergency department visits. For example, a cross-sectional study found that over half of all cancer-related emergency visits were potentially preventable, with many stemming from symptoms that PROs can monitor and address.

Moreover, PROs foster stronger patient-clinician relationships. They provide patients a voice, ensuring their concerns are documented and addressed between appointments. This continuous communication helps clinicians detect issues early, offering proactive interventions rather than reactive care. The findings are clear: integrating PROs into routine oncology practice improves outcomes across the board.

The Barriers Holding Back PRO Adoption

Despite their promise, PRO adoption faces significant hurdles. Many clinicians doubt their practical benefits, citing perceived inefficiencies or lack of relevance to everyday practice. Technological challenges further complicate implementation. For example, outdated systems or insufficient IT resources make collecting, analyzing, and acting on PRO data cumbersome.

Patients also face obstacles. Confidence in using digital tools varies widely, and older or less tech-savvy individuals may struggle with electronic PRO (ePRO) platforms. This underscores the need for user-friendly designs and robust support systems to ensure equitable access and engagement.

The Role of Technology in Scaling PROs

Advances in healthcare technology, such as AI-powered platforms like Commure, are poised to change the game for PRO collection. By seamlessly integrating ePRO workflows into existing systems, these solutions reduce the administrative burden on clinicians and empower patients to engage more actively in their care.

Key benefits of modern ePRO platforms include:

• Ease of use: Intuitive, patient-facing interfaces accessible via smartphones or tablets.
• Automation: Real-time data collection and analysis to surface critical insights for care teams.
• Workflow integration: Compatibility with electronic health records (EHRs) ensures a streamlined experience for clinicians.

Additionally, AI can analyze PRO data to identify trends, predict complications, and provide actionable recommendations. These tools not only enhance clinical decision-making but also demonstrate the tangible benefits of PROs, helping to alleviate clinician skepticism.

Paving the Way for Widespread PRO Adoption

To embed PROs as a standard of care, oncology practices must invest in technology, education, and change management. Here are key steps to success:

1. Leverage Existing Resources: Organizations like the PROTEUS Consortium and the National Cancer Institute offer tools to support PRO implementation and workflow integration.
2. Educate Clinicians: Training programs should focus on demonstrating the clinical value of PROs and addressing common misconceptions.
3. Focus on User Experience: Both patients and clinicians need intuitive, seamless platforms that simplify PRO collection and interpretation.
4. Prioritize Equity: Support systems must be in place to assist patients with limited digital literacy, ensuring no one is left behind in the shift to ePROs.

Enhancing Cancer Care

Healthcare has embraced innovations like hand hygiene protocols and surgical safety checklists, leading to significant improvements in patient outcomes. It’s time for oncology to take a similar leap forward by making PROs a cornerstone of care. Technology offers the tools to overcome barriers, but it’s up to clinicians, administrators, and industry leaders to champion this change.

At Commure, we’re committed to enabling this transformation. Our AI-driven solutions are designed to support clinicians and patients alike, making it easier than ever to integrate PROs into oncology workflows. Together, we can ensure every patient’s voice is heard and every outcome optimized—because better care starts with better communication.

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Explore Commure Engage

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This blog is adapted from an Op-Ed published in JAMA Oncology on January 16, 2025, authored by James A. Colbert, MD, MBA, and Louis Potters, MD.

Welcome to Commure Up Close! In this employee spotlight series, we sit down with team members from across Commure to learn about their backgrounds, their perspectives on our company culture, and their lives beyond work. Through these stories, we aim to provide a deeper look into why talented individuals choose Commure and how we work together to transform and simplify healthcare with cutting-edge technologies.

In this issue, we are excited to highlight Commure's Senior Vice President and General Manager, Dan Warner, who has been with Commure since July of 2024.
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Tell us a little bit about yourself, what do you like to do outside of work?
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Being a husband and father of two, my life is wonderfully full. My family has a joint love for sports, and my son is currently learning how to ice skate on the frozen ponds of the Midwest. I also enjoy watching basketball and doing the stuff that you do as a dad!
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As a kid what did you want to be when you grew up?
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It changed about every two weeks. First, I wanted to be a Power Ranger. Then I wanted to go to space. Followed by being a nurse (my mother is a retired nurse), and working in a church (my father served in a community). As I grew older, I started to enjoy IT and eventually found my way into tech. I stumbled into a little known company (at the time) called Uber, and have been hooked on tech ever since.
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Describe a day in the life of your role.
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I have two roles at the company. The first is my General Manager role leading Strongline, and the Patient Experience businesses, and the other is overseeing marketing. My roles take me in many different directions, but on most days I find myself speaking to prospects or customers, getting involved on high-impact initiatives, and providing our teams with the necessary resources to grow the business. I also spend a decent amount of time recruiting great talent.

What made you decide to join Commure?
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I left my prior role running Operations at the leading SaaS company for daycares to introspect and be intentional about what I wanted the next chapter of my career to be. It happened to be that Pat Winter (who goes way back with me to our time at Uber) texted me every month with "Hey, What are you doing? We’re doing fun stuff at Commure". I eventually took the call and quickly learned that Commure ticked two important boxes:

One, I immediately got behind the mission of improving and simplifying healthcare for all its constituents. We make a difference. Just by how much came to life for me shortly after starting. During a conference a caregiver came by to give me a hug because of thankful she was for Strongline helping her during a serious incident (the day prior). 

The second piece is that the team is built to build. When you enter our Mountain View office you immediately get this overwhelming sense of “stuff is happening”. The energy is infectious, especially at the time of advanced AI giving companies like us endless new ways of operating.
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How would you describe the Commure company culture?
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When I think back to my time at Uber, what made it successful was the relentless belief in the mission across every single person in the company, and letting customers drive the product roadmap, as opposed to the other way around. 

At Commure, we are united in our enthusiasm to take on the unbelievably grand mission of simplifying health care, especially when many say it cannot be done. You can ask any person here: It can be done, it will not be easy, but we love everything about it.

As it relates to customers, we run an important activity called Forward Deployed Engineering. Instead of showing up to a call with a defined set of product offerings, we invite customers to tell us about the problems they have. We then go there, co-develop on the spot, and only leave once we have established a working prototype. That is very unique. Both permeate throughout our culture and make me want to get out of bed every day.
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What has been your biggest accomplishment at Commure so far?
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When I look at our staff duress & smart sensor business, Strongline, it has gone through a lot of positive change. At the end of 2023, we released our next-generation duress and RTLS platform that serves over a quarter of a million caregivers daily. In 2024, we worked with all our customers to upgrade them. The team has done an incredible job working side-by-side with our customers to get it done.
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What advice would you give someone on their first day at Commure?
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You are here because of your capabilities; embrace it. We are not a place that requires permission for action. We don’t value work theatrics. The degree of freedom may be daunting or counterintuitive to where you spent your prior career, but it is freeing to know that you can make a decision, and then go make it right.
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Interested in a career building the next generation of healthcare technology powered by AI? We are always looking for talented people across our departments.
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