Cleveland Clinic deploys AI to automate faxed patient referrals

Cleveland Clinic has begun deploying artificial intelligence to handle one of healthcare's most persistent administrative bottlenecks: patient referrals that still arrive by fax.

The health system announced a partnership with AI company Luminai on September 16, 2026, to automate complex administrative workflows beginning with external referral processing. The initial deployment targets the labor-intensive task of sorting, prioritizing, and transcribing faxed referrals into electronic medical records.

How the automation works

Luminai's platform uses AI to identify incoming referral documents, interpret their clinical context, match patients and order types, then transcribe the information into Cleveland Clinic's medical records system for follow-up. Staff currently perform these steps manually for each faxed referral.

The system is designed to learn organization-specific context over time, which Cleveland Clinic expects will allow faster deployment of additional automation use cases. Luminai's engineering team will work directly with Cleveland Clinic staff to customize workflows rather than implementing a standardized configuration.

"Automation only delivers value when it reflects the realities of clinical and operational work," said Rohit Chandra, chief digital officer at Cleveland Clinic. "Our collaboration with Luminai allows us to apply AI in ways that meaningfully support our teams by reducing administrative burden and improving patient satisfaction."

Why it matters

Fax machines remain surprisingly common in healthcare despite decades of digital transformation. Processing paper-based referrals diverts clinical staff time from patient care while creating delays in care coordination. Automating this workflow could free significant staff capacity while reducing errors inherent in manual transcription. The partnership also signals how health systems are moving beyond clinical AI applications to tackle operational inefficiencies that affect both staff workload and patient experience.

Broader AI adoption in healthcare

Cleveland Clinic's referral automation is part of wider AI adoption across Northeast Ohio healthcare. The region's hospitals are testing AI-enabled medical devices and platforms for cost reduction and care improvement.

Nationally, AI tools in clinical settings now predict patient deterioration risk, record and summarize visits, suggest diagnoses, and process insurance claims, according to KFF. An industry report from 2026 found nearly 70 percent of clinicians use AI tools daily.

Kesava Kirupa Dinakaran, founder and CEO of Luminai, said healthcare organizations have an opportunity to use AI to modernize operations while maintaining existing record systems.

The technology's rapid growth has also raised questions about accuracy, oversight, and appropriate reliance on systems that can produce errors.

Cleveland Clinic and Luminai expect the initial referral processing deployment to inform how similar automation is approached in other parts of the organization.

These details were first reported by cleveland.com.