Hackensack Meridian to Deploy Lumeris’ AI Tool in MSSP ACO

In March 2025, Healthcare Innovation interviewed David Carmouche, M.D., executive vice president/chief medical and commercial officer at value-based care company Lumeris, about an AI-powered primary care solution named “Tom” in honor of Lumeris co-founder Tom Doerr, M.D. 

Now Lumeris, which partners with health systems and physician practices on value-based care arrangements, has announced that in an expansion of their partnership, 18-hospital Hackensack Meridian Health (HMH), New Jersey's largest integrated health network, will deploy the Tom platform to enable tracking, performance management, and scalable best-next-action workflows embedded in clinical operations. Lumeris said this will enable it to better support HMH physicians and care teams in coordinating preventive, longitudinal care for seniors, while reducing avoidable utilization and administrative burden.

St. Louis-based Lumeris and HMH are expanding their value-based partnership to include Traditional Medicare through the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) Medicare Shared Savings Program (MSSP).

The partnership, which currently focuses on Commercial and Medicare Advantage programs across Hackensack Meridian Health Partners, HMH's clinically integrated network (CIN) of primary care providers, will now extend to Traditional Medicare beneficiaries through the HMH Accountable Care Organization (ACO). Lumeris said it would build on people, processes, analytics, and technology already established throughout the CIN to operationalize a risk-based MSSP ACO program that supports proactive, physician-led care.

When Lumeris first introduced Tom, it was described as an AI-powered primary care-as-a-service solution. Carmouche said that description means that there are lots of services that can be delivered in primary care, some of which are delivered today inefficiently, and that could be done more efficiently with automation. “There are some services that should happen but that just don't happen because the care team doesn’t have the time or capacity to do that. Primary care as a service is using a data foundation to power multiple AI agents that can take on those services and do that in an organized way based on the knowledge of what an individual patient needs next on their health journey,” he added. 

He explained that if you have this data infrastructure that is inclusive of the electronic health record, potentially claims, data sets, consumer data, social determinants of health insights, etc., “we can determine, in many cases, the next best thing that should happen for someone to improve their health, and in some cases, that can involve an automated outreach to a patient. It may be educational, it may be a reminder, it may be a nudge, it may be a prompt. We're not taking humans out of the loop. Humans are still required to make diagnoses. We may suggest information or summarize information for a physician that might inform a diagnosis, but ultimately, a clinician is doing that. A clinician still is required to prescribe a medication, but there's a lot that happens around that that we think AI can help with as a 365 24/7 always-on partner for a primary care doctor.”

Clinically integrated networks usually have many different EHR systems. Carmouche was asked if Tom has to be custom-integrated into the EHRs of the provider systems. He said there are 119 different EHRs Lumeris works with now. “We don't have deep integrations with 119 EHRs, but with the big ones like Epic, etc., we do. I believe that the more we can integrate Tom into the EHR workflow, the more likely clinicians are to adopt it. There are parts of what Tom will do that don't need to get integrated into the EHR. There could be tasks and alerts to other care team members that probably could come into a different application in the office. But the idea that Tom could be interacting with patients outside of the view of the doctor is a new dynamic, right? It happens today with humans— for instance, a care manager might call a patient and interact with them, and somewhere in the EHR, there may be a tab where that is documented. Early on with AI, to build trust, I think we're going to have to surface to the clinician summaries of what Tom has done. I think they're going to want to see that. Whether that's deeply embedded in the EHR somewhere, or whether it's a desktop application that kind of slides over into view and just has a brief summary, I think each organization will have a different view of it. We're prepared, where necessary, to integrate to the degree that the customer will want it or demand it.”

Lumeris says it employs 1,200 engineers, healthcare specialists, and clinicians across offices in St. Louis and Boston and generated $3 billion in revenues in 2024.