Commure Up Close: Jason Scales Teams to Change Healthcare

Today, nearly 129 million Americans live with at least one chronic condition. These long-term illnesses (such as diabetes, heart disease, and kidney disease) now account for a staggering 90% of the nation’s $4.5 trillion in annual healthcare spending. Unlike other care journeys, chronic conditions require continuous care, personalized monitoring, and long-term treatment strategies, placing a growing burden on already-stretched clinical teams.

With the number of patients diagnosed with chronic conditions expected to rise sharply over the next decade (driven in large part by an aging population), health systems must act now to equip their care teams with the tools and support they need.

In this article, we explore the key challenges of chronic care management and how AI-powered solutions like Commure Engage are helping providers meet those challenges head-on.

What Makes Chronic Care Management So Challenging?

Chronic care management (CCM) is designed to help patients with long-term conditions (such as diabetes, heart disease, cancer, and chronic kidney disease) stay on track with their health goals and improve their overall quality of life. But delivering consistent, effective chronic care at scale is no small feat, especially because these conditions are complex and require collaboration across multiple stakeholders. Providers face a range of structural, clinical, and social barriers, including:

Low patient engagement and adherence: Many patients struggle to follow treatment plans once they leave the clinic. Medication routines, lifestyle adjustments, and regular check-ins can feel overwhelming, especially for individuals who don’t fully understand their diagnosis or why these steps matter. At the same time, care teams spend two hours on administrative work for every hour of engagement with patients, making it nearly impossible for care teams to be available to respond in real-time whenever someone has a question or concern during their care journey.

Gaps in access and workforce capacity: Patients in rural or underserved areas often lack access to specialists, resources, or even basic healthcare services, in fact as of September 2024, 66.33% of Primary Care Health Professional Shortage Areas (HPSAs) were located in rural areas. Meanwhile, the healthcare workforce is increasingly stretched thin, leaving little time to proactively manage chronic conditions manually.

Fragmented care coordination: When providers across primary, specialty, and community care settings operate in silos, it can lead to communication breakdowns, duplicated work, and inconsistent care. Poorly managed care transitions in critical moments, such as hospital discharges, often result in confusion and missed follow-ups, putting patients at risk.

Outdated tools and disjointed data: Many care teams still rely on manual workflows, disconnected EHRs, and legacy systems that make it difficult to track patient progress, share information across teams, and manage long-term care plans effectively.

Social and behavioral health factors: Social determinants of health (SDOH) (including income level, housing stability, access to transportation, and health literacy) play a major role in a patient’s ability to manage their condition. Coexisting mental health challenges, such as depression or anxiety, can further complicate care and increase the need for support.

How AI Helps Relieve the Burden of Chronic Care Management

Chronic care management places a heavy burden on both patients and care teams. For patients, managing symptoms, treatment plans, and follow-ups outside the clinic can be confusing and isolating. For providers, fragmented systems and manual workflows make it hard to deliver consistent, coordinated care. AI can help on both fronts, giving patients timely, personalized support while reducing the administrative load on clinical staff.

Here’s how solutions like Commure Engage are helping:

1. Smarter Symptom and Side Effect Support

Managing chronic illness at home can be unpredictable. Patients often face flare-ups or medication side effects that cause concern and disrupt their care plans. Even when these issues are minor, they can lead to patient anxiety, a surge in messages to care teams who are already operating at capacity, and even unnecessary hospital visits.

Commure Engage helps alleviate this pressure. The platform uses AI and natural language processing (NLP) to respond to most symptom-related questions instantly, with answers tailored to each patient’s care journey. The guidance is pulled from a trusted, clinician-curated knowledge base, ensuring patients receive accurate, relevant information. This allows care teams to focus their time where it matters most, while patients stay informed, on course, and out of the hospital.

2. Better Data Collection and Clinical Visibility

Effective chronic care depends on data, but turning that data into meaningful insights has traditionally relied on time-consuming, manual work from clinicians.

Commure Engage helps streamline this process. The platform automatically collects patient data through SMS check-ins and connected monitoring devices, tracking changes in key indicators like blood pressure, blood glucose, and weight. All of this information appears in a clinician-facing dashboard integrated with the EHR, making trends easy to view and act on. Care teams get the insights they need, right when they need them, without the burden of manual data entry.

3. Stronger Support for Social Determinants of Health (SDOH)

Social factors like food insecurity, unreliable transportation, and limited health literacy can create major challenges for patients managing chronic conditions. These issues often occur outside the clinical setting, but the responsibility to address them frequently falls to care teams.

Commure Engage helps lighten that load. The platform checks in with patients through SMS-based conversations and automated assessments, using targeted questions to uncover common SDOH challenges like food insecurity, transportation issues, and limited health literacy. This gives care teams a clearer picture of the external factors affecting each patient’s ability to manage their condition. Based on those insights, the platform surfaces relevant resources such as nutrition support, ride services, or pharmacy access so patients can get help without adding more work for clinical staff.

4. Scalable Provider Communication and Care Coordination

Chronic conditions often require patients to interact with multiple specialists and providers. Managing these relationships can be overwhelming for patients and creates added complexity for care teams trying to coordinate treatment plans across roles.

Commure Engage helps simplify this process. The platform enables providers to collaborate in a shared communication thread, tagging one another to streamline coordination. It also uses AI to route patient concerns to the appropriate team members, helping ensure timely, personalized follow-up without adding friction to the care workflow.

The Future of Chronic Care Management Is AI-Enabled

Supporting patients with chronic conditions is a complex and resource-intensive task, but AI is making it more manageable. Platforms like Commure Engage are already transforming how health systems deliver chronic care by reducing manual workload, improving care coordination, and helping patients stay engaged between visits.

As AI continues to evolve, providers will be even better equipped to deliver proactive, personalized support at scale. The path to more effective chronic care is no longer a distant goal. It’s already taking shape.

Ready to see what AI-enabled patient engagement looks like in action?

Speak to an AI Expert

Clinical teams are overwhelmed by the bloated tech stacks meant to support them. A 2023 survey of health system clinicians and CIOs found that 55% of respondents use between 50 and 500+ software solutions to run their healthcare operations. Innovations in healthcare tech that were supposed to streamline care have instead turned into a fragmented maze of point solutions, each solving a narrow problem while creating broader inefficiencies across the health system.

At the May 2025 Commure Nexus event, Ian Shakil (Chief Strategy Officer at Commure, and former Founder of Augmedix) explored how health systems can break free from this cycle and adopt a platform-based strategy for AI healthcare innovation.

“There are far too many point solutions degrading the digital health revolution, and now is the time to consolidate rationally to platform partners.” - Ian Shakil

The Problem with Point Solutions

The current market is oversaturated with narrow tools that address individual sections of clinician needs, including documentation, coding, order entry, RCM, prescriptions, and more. But for healthcare organizations, layering multiple vendors means stacking logins, integrations, and risks. This creates a massive work tax by disrupting workflows, takes attention away from patient care, and can also have huge financial implications. Ian Shakil captured the absurdity of this approach when he asked: 

“Can you imagine stacking all those per-user-per-month fees and what that would come to? I don't even know how you calculate it.”

Beyond user experience and cost, the burden of oversight is unsustainable for health systems. “I'm very familiar with health systems and their security reviews, compliance reviews, and responsibility committees,” Shakil continued. “I'm not sure there are enough people in the world to do all these committees for all of these different solutions.”

Fragmented digital systems can also create frustrating, disjointed experiences for patients, including missed follow-ups, redundant questions, delayed diagnoses, and difficulty accessing care.

What it Takes to Implement an AI Platform

Co-Development with Health Systems

Implementation requires deep collaboration and flexibility.

Commure’s approach centers on a Forward-Deployed Engineering (FDE) model (embedding product and engineering teams directly alongside health system partners). This allows for faster iterations, tailored customizations, and deeper alignment with clinical and operational workflows. Whether deploying across multiple EHRs at a system like HCA or optimizing for multilingual care at NEMS, Commure’s teams operate as an extension of the health system, not an external vendor.

A Headless EHR Approach to Healthcare Transformation

Health systems today face a strategic inflection point: consolidate around a single EHR, gamble on emerging point solutions, or invest in a flexible platform. Ian Shakil warned that relying solely on a singular EHR is shortsighted:

“To be all in on [your EHR] and perceive that as your strategy and to be beholden to it and its pacing and its tech debt… can sometimes be dangerous."

Ian then pointed to the emerging concept of the “headless EHR”, an open, intelligent layer that interacts with existing systems without being limited by them. This concept is core to Commure’s approach: by operating above/around the EHR layer, Commure enables health systems to innovate rapidly, deploy AI capabilities without being bottlenecked by vendor roadmaps, and unify workflows across fragmented systems.

Platform-Powered Agentic AI

“We're moving from documentation assistants to workflow orchestration agents, enabling autonomous care actions.” These AI agents are designed from the ground up to jump in, take on routine tasks, and help clinicians move smoothly from one step to the next.

Combining agentic AI with Ambient AI is where it starts to feel like a real teammate. Shakil described it as “this super resident being able to go so much further beyond the note… teeing up ambient nudges to help you with CDI, CDS, patient safety.” Whether it’s pulling together a post-visit summary, catching a missed diagnosis code, or teeing up a care plan handoff, agents work quietly in the background without slowing anything down.

Commure is building for flexibility, with modular agents that plug into real-world care settings. It’s all about creating value fast and making sure AI works for the clinician, not the other way around.

Point solutions are dead. Platform thinking is the path forward.

Curious how health systems like HCA and NEMS are putting these strategies into practice today?

Speak With an AI Expert

You likely had several options — why did you choose Commure?
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Hirshik Rajendra, Senior Software Engineer (Computer Science ‘23): I wanted to join a place which would push me to the limit and allow me to gain ownership of products and code-flows right out of college. Commure prides itself on being a very engineering-forward company and that made me strongly consider it when I was deciding where to go. Also, the startup hierarchy and fast paced environment intrigued me as it would allow for a larger opportunity to grow my career.

Rachana Chaudhari, Software Engineer (Computer Science ‘23): Previously, I had worked in the healthcare industry, but my scope was limited. When my friend at Commure told me about a fast-paced, rapidly growing company that offers opportunities to build products and directly impact the lives of healthcare providers, I knew I wanted to join. Also what drew me in were the testimonials on the website and the Strongline product, which provides safety to healthcare providers across the country. It was an absolute no-brainer to put my skills to good use.

Amon Sthapit, Software Engineer (Computer Science ‘24): I wanted to try something different after grad school, as I had previously worked in the video game industry. Healthcare tech seemed a lot more interesting and impactful than other options. Commure is building some pretty cool stuff and everyone I talked to seemed really excited about what they were working on.

How have you grown and what are you proud of accomplishing?

Hrishik: I was promoted to Senior Software Engineer within a year and I now lead a pod of 5 engineers. I’ve been given more autonomy about how I approach problems and have also gained a lot of leadership experience. My proudest accomplishment was when I worked directly with the CTO during a significant outage of our external clearinghouse. I built the infrastructure required to adapt our processes to work with two other clearinghouses in a span of less than a week. This helped us continue to submit claims for our clients. I don’t think that I would have had the opportunity to do something like this at another company and it was surreal seeing the real impact of my changes.

Rachana: In the past few months, I’ve been lucky enough to visit the client site’s and get a feel for their needs. I’ve also been working on some projects that directly impact the central supply’s daily operations. From dismissing questions about my work because there was nothing interesting to share, I have now come a long way where I can’t stop talking about it.

Amon: I’m really proud of building the analytics graphs for Ambient AI’s admin dashboard feature that’s being used by site administrators at some of the biggest hospitals. Calculating several weeks of metrics for hundreds of providers in a site, making sure that it’s still fast, and then building the UI to showcase those metrics was overall a very fun project.

What’s something you love about your team that has nothing to do with work?

Hrishik: I love how close my team is and that everyone is willing to support each other in and out of the workplace. We consistently go out to grab meals, go on drives, and get boba at work, which makes working with my team a great experience.

Rachana: My team has been the greatest contributing factor in loving my work. We have gym streaks, and we plan and execute a lot of fun hikes on weekends. Our lunch conversations in the office range from which soccer team won, to politics, to how we can improve our badminton game (and a little bit of work).

Amon: I like how everyone on my team is super friendly and I can just go talk to them about random things at any time.

What would you tell another Cornell student considering Commure today?

Hrishik: “Why did you wait so long to apply?” In all seriousness, my decision to work at Commure out of college has been one of the best decisions I’ve made. I’ve learnt so much in the course of the last two years, and we’re just getting started. I look forward to what the future holds, and I strongly urge you to be a part of it!

Rachana: I know it sounds awesome to join a big tech company after college, but it’s not all sunshine and rainbows. You might get a super exciting project to work on or a team that thinks outside the box. It’s a bit of a gamble. However, with Commure, it’s a sure thing! This might sound a bit cheesy, but there’s growth and inspiration everywhere you look.

Amon: Commure is in an exciting spot in the current healthcare tech landscape, working on meaningful products for healthcare providers at the best hospitals, and everyone here is very smart and hardworking.

SAN FRANCISCO – July 10, 2025 – Canopy, a leader in wearable safety and real-time location systems (RTLS) for healthcare, and Commure, the company behind next-generation AI infrastructure for health systems, today announced a strategic partnership to enhance support for Commure Strongline customers and ensure continued innovation in staff safety.

As part of the partnership, Canopy will assume a central role in the management and support of Commure Strongline customers going forward. A combined network of more than 300,000 caregivers, paired with Canopy’s deep domain expertise in staff safety technology, creates a category-defining leader focused on innovation, continuity, and long-term impact in healthcare safety.

The partnership is designed to ensure a seamless experience for customers, who will be able to continue using the staff safety system they know and trust with zero disruption. It reflects a shared commitment to advancing healthcare safety while allowing each company to focus on its core strengths: Canopy in RTLS-powered safety and Commure in AI infrastructure that transforms workflows.

“This partnership is all about ensuring a seamless and positive future for Strongline customers,” said Shan Sinha, CEO of Canopy. “We are honored to bring our dedicated focus on healthcare safety to support them. This collaboration is a powerful way to deliver on our shared promise to protect healthcare staff.”

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“Strongline customers will continue to be supported by an industry leader, while enabling Commure to focus on its core business of advancing next-generation AI infrastructure for health systems,” said Dan Warner, SVP & General Manager of Commure. “We’re excited about the potential of our partnership and our shared commitment to supporting health systems.”

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The partnership marks a new chapter in Commure’s collaboration with Canopy, resolving all disputes between the companies.

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About Canopy
Canopy’s vision is to create technology that transforms how healthcare organizations support and protect their staff—fostering safer, more empowering environments where caregivers feel valued and equipped to deliver exceptional care. The company’s mission is to enhance healthcare worker safety and well-being through reliable, innovative, and ubiquitously connected technology solutions, delivered as a comprehensive, partnership-driven service.

About Commure
Commure delivers next-generation AI infrastructure for enterprise health systems, integrating ambient intelligence, agentic AI, and revenue cycle automation on a single platform. Its Forward Deployed Engineering teams work directly with clinicians and administrators to boost margins, reduce burden, and improve patient engagement. Commure integrates with 60+ EHRs and powers millions of encounters, hundreds of millions of interactions, and tens of billions in annual claims. Learn more at Commure.com

Media Contacts 
Canopy:
Jason Fass
press@canopyworks.com 

Commure:
Dan Warner
pr@commure.com

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Read the press release

When you’re building for one of the most complex and consequential industries in the country, you need more than just smart people and a good product roadmap. According to Commure’s Chief Operating Officer, Deepika Bodapati, you need clarity on your culture. You need a team that moves fast, works shoulder-to-shoulder with customers, and takes pride in taking on tough challenges to make an enduring impact.

At Commure, we aim to bring mastery of craft and quality solutions to healthcare’s center to make the day better for providers, patients, and administrators. That mission fuels the kind of high-ownership, high-output culture that connects strategy and vision to real-world execution. 

Watch the full interview with Deepika Bodapati below to hear how Commure’s culture enables us to rapidly shape the future of healthcare, alongside healthcare.

Why Culture Is Important to Successful M&A

Commure’s growth has always been grounded in speed and focus, but we also believe in using every tool available to drive real innovation. That includes M&A. As Deepika explains, “we believe in using M&A as a powerful tool. There are exceptional companies that have done that, and we look to emulate them in that regard.

How you integrate is as important as who you integrate with, according to Deepika. Culture must lead the way. 

“At Commure, everyone has a crystal clear understanding of our company values, how we do things, and how we don’t do things. For us, speed is above all else. There are a lot of folks who say that, but we try to live that, every single day. It’s something we are constantly pushing on.”

Whether integrating new companies or hiring new talent, ensuring deep alignment with Commure’s mission is essential according to Deepika: “Finding fit, culture fits, and people who are willing to take on the Commure ethos is something that is super important.” 

Commure’s acquisitions in 2024 of Augmedix, a pioneering clinical documentation company, and Memora Health, a patient engagement platform, were just that: “The companies we’ve partnered with in the past year have been excellent mirrors of what the Commure ethos stands for, and we’re proud to partner with all of them.”

Enabling Rapid Collaboration at Commure Nexus

Commure Nexus is another example where this culture of speed comes to life. The event brings together leading healthcare executives with Commure’s top engineers and senior leaders for focused, hands-on collaboration to solve longstanding challenges. As Deepika explained of the inaugural Commure Nexus, “We are going on a listening tour of the real-world problems these health executives are seeing every day, decades into their careers.”

What comes next is rapidly turning these real-world insights into tangible solutions. Commure’s team of engineers jumps into hackathons to build solutions based on customer feedback: 

“That’s what is so special about Nexus. The people here are the ones who actually build the change, and the people who are going to enact the change.”

Putting Top Talent on Healthcare’s Hardest Problems

We believe the brightest engineers should tackle healthcare’s hardest problems. The ones that disproportionately affect care quality, costs, and clinician burnout, from shifting insurance requirements to rising administrative burdens.

Deepika recognizes that it’s not necessarily glamorous work, but it’s important: “You don’t often see the engineers graduating saying I need to work with billing teams! These people are the ones that are bearing some of the toughest burdens in healthcare and they don’t get the help that they need.”

“We put engineers alongside these people, and build solutions to actually make their lives easier and lighten the load. Which also ends up impacting the bottom line.”

It’s tied to the critical need to shore up the workforce shortage in healthcare, shared Deepika. “It ends up impacting retention for health systems, it ends up impacting the number of physicians you can hire the next year, and it ends up impacting patient care.”

Join Us

We’re building for the future of healthcare, one where the best minds in technology work hand-in-hand with the people carrying the system forward. As Dhruv Parathaskary, our Chief Technology Officer, shared: every healthcare company will be a technology company in the future. At Commure, we’re enabling that transition alongside healthcare organizations for the sake of a better, more simple healthcare system for all.

If you’re an engineer, builder, or healthcare innovator who wants to move fast, exercise extreme ownership, and make a real impact, explore our job openings and come talk to us. We’re just getting started.

No one becomes a doctor to spend their evenings in the EHR. But that's still the norm across most health systems. In fact, 62% of physicians say documentation is the number one driver of burnout.

AI medical transcription promises to fix that. But not every tool delivers on the hype of artificial intelligence. With over 50 solutions crowding the market, knowing what actually works (and what doesn’t) matters.

Here’s what AI medical transcription looks like when it delivers real impact, both from a clinical and financial standpoint.

Redefining Medical Transcription with AI

AI medical transcription uses speech recognition and natural language processing to turn live clinical conversations into structured documentation. These tools work in the background during patient visits, capturing what’s said, applying clinical context, and generating notes that go directly into the EHR.

But the best platforms don’t stop there. They pull in relevant history before the visit, help organize information as it’s discussed, and structure the output so it flows downstream into workflows like billing, reporting, and analytics. While less after-hours documentation is the carrot on the stick, what more and more health systems are beginning to realise is that fully-featured AI medical transcription tools can positively affect the entire healthcare workflow.

What to Expect When It Works

Less Time on the Clock
When documentation happens during the visit, not after, clinicians leave on time. That change alone improves provider satisfaction and helps prevent burnout from compounding day after day.

Documentation That Supports Revenue
When notes are complete, timely, and structured properly, claims are more likely to be accepted the first time. That leads to fewer denials, faster reimbursement, and less strain on billing teams.

Leverage Actionable, Trusted Data

Every clinical conversation holds insights that go beyond the visit. When transcription tools generate structured outputs, that information becomes usable across the organization for quality reporting, population health, and even future AI-driven workflows.

Reduces Workflow Bottlenecks

When documentation slows down, so does everything else, including room turnover, team coordination, and even discharge planning. Real-time transcription keeps visits moving and makes it easier for clinicians to stay focused on care, not catching up.

Scales Without Compromising the Workflow

The most effective transcription tools adapt to clinical reality, supporting different specialties, visit types, and documentation styles. Commure’s Forward Deployed Engineering model helps make that possible, tailoring implementation to fit existing workflows while raising quality across the system.

Real-World Impact

Commure Ambient AI is already live across a range of care settings, reducing documentation time, easing burnout, and helping clinicians focus on what matters most.

At North East Medical Services (NEMS), a multilingual community health center, providers saved more than five minutes per visit. With real-time, multilingual note capture in English, Spanish, and Chinese, many clinicians reported heading home one to two hours earlier each day.

Dignity Health saw similar gains after switching from another vendor. Some providers reclaimed up to three hours daily, plus four more on weekends. That meant more face time with patients and fewer late nights spent catching up on charts.

At A&A Women’s Health, clinicians now complete documentation the same day. Workload dropped by 20 to 25 percent, and evenings are no longer consumed by unfinished notes. One provider shared that, for the first time in years, he got through a holiday without needing to open his laptop.

The outcomes speak for themselves: better notes, less burnout, and a clearer path forward for teams stretched thin.

Want to see how Commure Ambient AI can work for your team?

Speak With an Expert

You likely had several options — why did you choose Commure?

Elliot Berdy, Software Engineer (Computer Science ‘23): I was always interested in careers in both medicine and engineering, however, by graduation, it was clear that software could let me improve healthcare at scale far quicker than medical school ever could. I set out to find a company where I could blend both passions and Commure stood out immediately. It was small enough that every engineer ships critical features, yet mature enough that I’d have seasoned mentors. I wanted to work on a product whose impact I could explain without caveats, and hearing physicians describe how Commure’s platform cuts time spent on administrative tasks and increases their revenue and ability to run their practices convinced me the software tangibly improves patient care. The combination of clear clinical benefit, real ownership, and an energizing, accountable team made the choice obvious.

Chaitanya Pedada, Software Engineer (Computer Science ‘20): Commure was the right fit for what I was looking for in an engineering challenge. The key factor in my decision was the vision of creating a healthcare industry where providers, nurses, and administration staff can truly focus on their patients’ health instead of the hours of burdensome paperwork and documentation and constant stress of surviving month to month on razor-thin margins. I saw an opportunity to contribute to disrupting the healthcare industry while being surrounded by passionate, driven teammates. 

Harrison Chu, Senior Operations Manager (Cognitive Science ‘21): Right out of college, I joined Amazon as a P&L Vendor Manager. It was initially a valuable learning experience, but soon I found myself hitting a growth ceiling. When I discovered Athelas (pre-Commure merger), I was drawn to the fast-paced, mission-driven environment and the opportunity to work with ambitious peers focused on eliminating administrative burden in healthcare and rebuilding the system from the ground up. I was excited by the chance to work with a group of young, driven individuals from diverse backgrounds who all cared deeply about building great products for our customers. Big tech offered stability and a clear career ladder, but I knew I’d learn and grow much faster in an environment like Commure, where I’d have real ownership and impact from day one.

Benjamin Gilbert, Forward Deployed Engineer (Computer Science & Linguistics ‘23): My mom and girlfriend both work in healthcare, and hearing about their work gives me a good sense of the types of issues that medical professionals have - one of Commure’s goals is to identify those issues and solve them. Commure is on the good side of healthcare, in that the mission is to help make things easier for doctors and patients. Depending on your role, you may end up flying out to hospitals and collaborating with doctors in person. It’s fulfilling work! 

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How did UCLA prepare you for working at Commure?

Elliot: UCLA’s public-school environment trained me to be relentlessly proactive—office hours can fill up fast, research spots are scarce, and nobody hands you opportunities unless you chase them. That self-starter mindset maps perfectly to Commure, where engineers are encouraged to spot problems, claim ownership, and sprint after solutions. The quarter system reinforced that habit: with only ten weeks per class, you learn to absorb new concepts, ship projects, and iterate under tight deadlines—excellent rehearsal for a startup’s rapid release cadence.

Chaitanya: UCLA offered an excellent foundation through both classes and clubs for my career. Professor Eggert’s impossible exams (dumbfounded how he comes up with such difficult questions!) set the tone for the ambiguity that the problems in the real world pose and helped develop the critical thinking required. Also, some of the classes such as CS32 (shoutout to Professor Nachenberg) and CS130 developed useful skills I definitely still use in my day-to-day. Outside of classes, a club called DevX played a huge role in helping me discover my love for building and understanding the product lifecycle.

Harrison: UCLA is a massive public university where you quickly learn to advocate for yourself—resources are limited, and nothing is handed to you. That environment taught me to be a self-starter, own projects from start to finish, and push through complex challenges. Being surrounded by talented, driven peers also pushed me to improve every day—those experiences built the foundation I rely on at Commure.

Benjamin: Group collaborations are a big part of it, and those CS courses are amazing for honing your problem-solving skills. But there’s a lot that UCLA didn’t prepare me for: I had to learn web development almost entirely on my own. So get internships! You’ll need that real-world experience. 

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What is something you are really proud of accomplishing?

Elliot: I helped design and drive a complete rebuild of our payment-posting pipeline—the component that determines client revenue and patient charges. We migrated with zero downtime, and customer ticket volume for these issues has dropped significantly. Being able to deliver a better customer experience is something that I look back on proudly. 

Chaitanya: I’m really proud of our team’s latest launch with Lattimore, our largest EHR customer to date. Our team put in an immense amount of effort and coordinated lock-in-step with our partners there to ensure a smooth transition that had zero downtime for Lattimore’s providers and staff - they were able to continue providing care to their patients without skipping a beat. We learned a lot from the experience, and I’m excited to iterate and perfect the process.

Harrison: I’m proud to be part of the team building our EHR. It’s a central tool for providers, nurses, MAs, and office staff – and unfortunately, most EHRs in the market today receive negative feedback. We're working to change that by seamlessly integrating clinical documentation and revenue workflows into a single, streamlined experience. I’ve spent time onsite with several soon-to-launch customers across different specialties, learning their workflows firsthand. It’s incredibly rewarding to build alongside our users and deliver something they’re genuinely excited to use.

Benjamin: Our team flew out to Cincinnati to work in-person with a children’s hospital. We got to shadow doctors and talk to executives in the healthcare industry. It was super cool! 

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What’s something you love about your team that has nothing to do with work?

Elliot: Our team feels more like a group of close friends rather than just coworkers—we’re young, energetic, and genuinely enjoy spending time together outside the office, whether that’s pickup basketball after work, spontaneous coffee runs, or weekend hikes. That camaraderie makes collaboration effortless and keeps the culture fun and supportive.

Chaitanya: My fondest memories with the team have been the ski trips. Nothing like getting away for a weekend to shred the slopes at Tahoe and end the day playing board games and sharing stories in a cabin.

Harrison: The friendships. I’ve built strong relationships with teammates across different functions, and we hang out often outside of work—whether it’s grabbing meals or playing sports like pickleball, volleyball, or golf. It’s a fun, tight-knit community.

Benjamin: Our company is on the younger side, so if you join us as a college grad, you’ll be working with others who are in the same boat. My team’s full of people who are easy to work with, and we know how to have fun.

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What would you tell another UCLA student considering Commure today?

Elliot: If you want your first job to combine rapid technical growth with work that genuinely moves the healthcare needle, choose Commure. You’ll ship production code that clinicians rely on from day one, learn directly from senior engineers who’ve scaled systems before, and see your impact measured in hours saved for providers and better experiences for patients, not in vanity metrics. It’s the fastest way I know to build both your résumé and a career you’ll be proud to talk about.

Chaitanya: You’re in for an incredible journey surrounded by brilliant folks who truly care! You’ll have the opportunity to make an impact from Day 1 and grow at a tremendous speed.

Harrison: Commure is an amazing place for new grads to dive headfirst into building meaningful products in healthcare. You’ll get more ownership than you expect—maybe even more than you think you’re ready for—but that’s what makes it such a rare and valuable experience. You’ll grow fast, learn a ton, and make a real impact from day one.

Benjamin: Everyone here is very smart and hardworking, so if those are the type of people you want to work with, come join us!

Explore Career Opportunities

North East Medical Services (NEMS) is one of the largest community health centers in the United States serving the medically underserved population offering linguistically competent and culturally sensitive healthcare services in many languages and dialects, but off the shelf AI technology couldn’t handle real-world conversations that switch languages, dialects, and even topics mid-sentence. To solve this, NEMS Chief Information Officer, Murali Athuluri, turned to Commure. What followed was a close partnership with Commure’s Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) team to build a fully integrated Ambient AI solution, customized for their workflows, embedded within Epic, and built to support every voice in the room.

“What inspired me to work with Commure: Forward Deployed Engineering.” – Murali Athuluri, Chief Information Officer, NEMS

Watch the testimonial video below and read the article summarizing his keynote session at this year’s Commure Nexus to learn more about why they chose Commure, the experience working with Commure’s FDE team, and the impact of Ambient AI on clinician time.

Why NEMS Needed a Tailored Approach to Ambient AI

NEMS is dedicated to providing linguistically competent healthcare services in many languages and dialects including English, Cantonese, Mandarin, Spanish, Vietnamese, Burmese, Tagalog, and Hindi. Traditional off-the-shelf Ambient AI solutions couldn't meet their unique needs.

Murali framed the problem clearly: "Our mission is to provide culturally sensitive and linguistically competent care...Any AI solution must be able to serve the voice in the language of the patient."

What made this particularly challenging, Murali explained, was the need for "a personalized ambient solution for NEMS and for every provider that works for NEMS," that also integrated seamlessly with Epic. The solution had to work fluidly across encounters that often blend languages, switch dialects, and even topics mid-conversation: 

"We're having patients having conversations in Chinglish i.e. Chinese and English at the same time. We're talking about baseball. We're talking about their children, their daycare issues, and we’re also talking about their knee pain or chronic blood pressure."

How Forward-Deployed Engineering Was a Game-Changer

Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) is a software delivery model where engineers are embedded directly within organizations, working closely with frontline staff and IT teams. Unlike traditional software and IT approaches that rely heavily on distant project management, FDE emphasizes on-site collaboration, rapid prototyping, and iterative design.

Before selecting Commure, NEMS carefully evaluated multiple vendors. “Commure distinguished itself by deeply understanding and integrating into the real moments of care—where providers and patients connect. Their ability to deliver a truly seamless, compassionate solution at the point of care made them the clear choice.”

Murali recounted how Commure’s team didn’t just understand the challenge but integrated themselves fully into the solution: "Max Krueger [Head of Forward Deployed Engineering at Commure] and team would show up after 7 p.m. encounters, sit with the doctors along with the patient and figure out exactly how it needs to work." That level of commitment set a new bar for partnership. It wasn’t just about delivering software; it was about co-creating care experiences tailored specifically for NEMS.

Max Krueger, Head of FDE at Commure, highlighted the importance of the physical proximity of end users to the process, describing FDE as "a contact sport. It's being on the ground so that we're able to quickly understand the problems and quickly iterate a solution for these physicians, administrators, and patients." 

Partnership in Action: FDE’s Impact at NEMS

Since beginning their partnership in October 2023, Commure’s engineers have continued to work closely alongside NEMS' clinicians, turning late nights spent with physicians and providers into early wins via custom-tailored high-impact solutions.

One major achievement was developing support for more than 20 sub dialects of Cantonese and handling real-time multi-language switching during patient encounters. Murali noted, "We were able to deliver ambient solutions eloquently in Cantonese, Mandarin, Vietnamese, Spanish, Tagalog, Hindi, and others."

The partnership has already yielded measurable results:

• Over 13,000 ambient encounters documented across multiple languages.
• More than 50 providers are actively using Commure Ambient AI daily.
• An average of 5.2 minutes saved per patient encounter.
• Significant improvement in provider-patient interactions and a marked reduction in documentation workload, achieving what NEMS refers to as 'keyboard liberation.'

Murali shared the transformative impact, saying, "Our doctors are spending more time looking into the eyes of the patient and delivering what they truly meant to deliver. Joy of Medicine!"

Commure’s Ambient AI Technology Now Integrated into Epic Toolbox, Enhancing Clinical Efficiency and Patient Care

Epic remains an essential system of record for NEMS with core workflows particularly for data safety and compliance. However, Commure Ambient AI is leveraged to extend the functionality of Epic to fulfill specific patient experience goals, particularly compassionate and linguistically competent ambient documentation.

Murali emphasized, "If there is a workflow optimization that we can achieve by going out to the external market, we will push the boundaries of Epic to make it happen."

What followed was a collaborative effort that extended the functionality of Epic. Commure’s engineering team worked closely with NEMS to integrate Ambient AI directly into Epic modules—including Haiku and custom flow sheet fields—enabling advanced documentation experiences without disrupting provider workflows.

In a decisive move to advance clinical innovation, Murali (Muralimohan) Athuluri, Chief Information Officer, directly engaged Epic leadership to champion the integration of Commure’s Ambient AI technology. “I spoke to Epic and said, ‘This is one partner—Commure—where the collaboration truly works for us, with proven results to show for it,’” said Athuluri.

That advocacy led to the development of productized integrations that embed Commure’s Ambient AI seamlessly into Epic’s infrastructure. As a result, Commure Ambient AI is now officially available in the Epic Toolbox under the Ambient Voice category.

This integration marks a significant milestone in the evolution of ambient clinical intelligence. By reducing documentation burden and streamlining workflows, it empowers clinicians to focus more fully on patient care—enhancing both provider satisfaction and patient outcomes.

Rather than working around Epic, NEMS and Commure worked through it, demonstrating that health systems don’t have to choose between compliance and innovation. With the right partner, they can have both.

Lessons for Health Systems: Scale, Strategy, and Mindset

The NEMS-Commure collaboration demonstrates the power and scalability of Forward Deployed Engineering. More than a technical strategy, FDE represents a shift in mindset, prioritizing provider and patient experiences and iteratively co-developing solutions.

Dhruv Parthasarathy, CTO at Commure, summarized this mindset clearly: "Customization is what we love. I get more customization over my coffee at Starbucks and my pizza at Domino's than software running my health system. That has to change."

EHRs like Epic, while critical, should serve as a robust foundation upon which innovation and differentiation are built. Health systems must define their strategic priorities clearly and partner with innovators who can co-create tailored solutions to enhance patient experience, provider satisfaction, and operational efficiency.

The partnership between NEMS and Commure proves what is possible when software is built with providers rather than just for them through true co-innovation. See how FDE can transform your health system.

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