Cleveland Clinic and Luminai Partner to Automate Hospital Referrals with AI

As artificial intelligence (AI) technologies continue to evolve, healthcare systems are increasingly moving beyond specialized tools for individual tasks and toward comprehensive platforms that can manage end-to-end operational workflows. One of the leading institutions in this shift is the Cleveland Clinic, which has partnered with startup Luminai to automate complex administrative processes, starting with referral management.

Cleveland Clinic, one of the world’s largest academic medical centers, reported nearly 16 million patient encounters in 2025 across its network of 23 hospitals and 300 outpatient facilities. Referrals are a critical entry point for many of these care journeys, but managing them has traditionally been a labor-intensive process. The current workflow relies heavily on manual review of faxes and the interpretation of unstructured information.

Kesava Kirupa Dinakaran, founder and CEO of Luminai, highlights the challenges in automating healthcare administrative functions: "Healthcare’s administrative functions operate as a massive, manual coordination layer. Encoding that work into software has historically been difficult because workflows span systems and point solutions, depend on unstructured inputs, and require embedded business and clinical context at every step."

Automating Referral Management

Recent advances in AI have made it possible to handle this complexity directly, not just automate isolated tasks but execute full workflows reliably. Luminai’s technology is designed to streamline the referral process by automating several key steps:

• Intake: Automatically scanning and interpreting faxes and other unstructured data.
• Validation: Ensuring that all required information is present and accurate.
• Follow-up: Coordinating with various systems and stakeholders to complete the referral.

Rohit Chandra, Cleveland Clinic’s executive vice president and chief digital officer, explained why they chose referrals as their first focus: "We started with referrals because they’re one of those workflows that touch a lot of systems and involve a lot of coordination behind the scenes. There’s intake, validation, follow-up. Before this, a lot of that process depended on caregivers manually reviewing information and coordinating across different systems."

The Cleveland Clinic processes millions of faxes annually, each containing handwritten notes and operational data that must be extracted and imported into electronic medical records (EMRs). In pilot tests with Luminai’s technology, the clinic saw significant improvements in efficiency and accuracy.

"All of these referrals were being processed through raw fax operations. They were getting millions of faxes where the job of the operations organization was to look at every fax and the handwritten notes within them, and then read and extract both the operational and clinical data from those faxes, and then import it into the EMR," Chandra noted.

Key Takeaways

• Automated Intake: Luminai’s AI can automatically scan and interpret unstructured data from faxes, reducing manual review time.
• Validation and Accuracy: The technology ensures that all necessary information is present and accurate, minimizing errors in the referral process.
• Seamless Coordination: By automating follow-up steps, the system coordinates with various systems and stakeholders, streamlining the entire workflow.
• Scalability: The solution can be applied to other complex administrative processes beyond referrals, potentially transforming how hospitals manage their operations.

The partnership between Cleveland Clinic and Luminai represents a significant step forward in leveraging AI to improve hospital operations. By addressing the inefficiencies in referral management, they are setting a precedent for how AI can be integrated into healthcare systems to enhance patient care and operational efficiency.