Cleveland Clinic Deploys Luminai AI To Automate Referral Workflows

Cleveland Clinic has partnered with AI startup Luminai to automate administrative workflows, as the company closed a $38 million Series B round, bringing total funding to about $60 million according to Forbes.

The deployment focuses on referral management, a high-volume process that still relies heavily on manual intake, document review, and coordination across systems. Cleveland Clinic operates 23 hospitals and serves 15 million patients, making even incremental workflow improvements material at scale.

Administrative work accounts for roughly a quarter of U.S. healthcare spending, driven by fragmented systems and unstructured inputs such as faxed documents. Referrals often arrive in large volumes and require staff to interpret, validate, and route information before care can begin.

According to Luminai, the platform is designed to handle that variability by converting unstructured data into structured formats and executing workflows across systems. It encodes hospital-specific standard operating procedures and applies them to tasks such as identifying referral documents, extracting key data, matching patients and providers, and routing cases to the appropriate departments.

When the system encounters ambiguity, it escalates the case to human staff with most of the processing complete. Those interventions are fed back into the system to improve performance over time.

Early deployments have achieved automation rates exceeding 80% for some document types, according to the company. Luminai also reports an average time-to-value of 48 days, compared with typical enterprise healthcare software implementations that can take 18 to 24 months.

“We’re always looking for ways to meaningfully apply AI to streamline workflows and make them more efficient for our caregivers,” said Rohit Chandra, Chief Digital Officer at Cleveland Clinic. “The goal of our collaboration with Luminai is to reduce administrative burden and allow our caregivers to focus on patient care and more substantial work.”

The partnership is part of a shift in how health systems evaluate AI vendors. Rather than deploying narrow tools for individual tasks, organizations are increasingly looking for systems that can operate across workflows and integrate with existing infrastructure.

Luminai is entering a crowded market. Companies including Ambience Healthcare, Artera, and Assort Health have raised significant funding to target adjacent administrative and clinical workflows.

At the same time, multiple AI platforms are being deployed within the same health systems. Cleveland Clinic is also working with Dyania Health on clinical data abstraction, showing a multi-vendor approach to enterprise AI adoption.

“Large health systems need a single company and platform to solve multiple problems, instead of being burdened with dealing with hundreds of vendors,” said Shailendra Singh, Managing Director at Peak XV Partners.

Healthcare AI deployments remain constrained by long sales cycles, compliance requirements, and the difficulty of scaling beyond initial use cases. Cleveland Clinic and Luminai are starting with referrals, with plans to expand into other high-volume administrative workflows.