Introducing Spark, Luma’s AI to Transform the Staff & Patient Experience

Aditya Bansod

Today, we announced the release of Spark, our AI capabilities, and two brand-new Spark-enabled products: Navigator (patient concierge) and Fax Transform (fax automation). We’ve been building Spark over the last year to provide a brand-new way to solve persistent pain points that impact healthcare organizations’ staff and patients. This new technology demonstrates our commitment to smart applications of the latest and most groundbreaking technology, to address real needs and transform frustration into great experiences.

We created Spark because we continue hearing from our customers that they’re doing more than they ever thought possible – and they’re doing it with less. Every provider, front office staff member, end user, nurse, and mid level admin we talk to tells us that they’re serving more patients, that margins are tight, and that staffing is a challenge. Yet, these organizations are doing amazing things like:

  • Expanding beyond the walls of the organization with mobile clinics at Zufall Health – going above and beyond despite uncertainty in federal FQHC funding. 
  • Reaching out to patients who need colonoscopies and offering Cologuard tests at Virtua Health – ultimately catching hundreds of positive results earlier.
  • Bringing patients in as active members of their inpatient program at Banner Health – with “Text the CEO” feedback that goes directly from the patient to hospital leadership. 

Spark is one way we’re pushing ourselves and our technology to do more to support amazing healthcare organizations like these. 

We believe that technology needs to be designed for real needs and real people. It can’t be just cool technology looking for a use case. That’s been our philosophy for nearly a decade now as we’ve pushed the envelope with machine learning, NLP, and LLMs, and we continue to follow that ethos with our AI technology. 

Spark: The Details

Spark transforms the tricky and all-too-manual parts of patient access, staff workflows, and healthcare interactions:

  • Understanding natural language (phone, SMS)
  • Parsing structured information (faxes, intake forms, etc.)
  • Providing actionable next steps

Spark builds on our deep EHR integration and patient context already available in the Luma platform. It supports both patient interactions and staff efficiency by relying on:

  • Bi-directional integration with leading EHRs, including Oracle Health, Epic, eClinicalWorks, MEDITECH, athenahealth, NextGen, and Greenway Health.
  • Zero-retention generative AI used with healthcare privacy in mind, including OpenAI GPT-4, Claude Opus, deepgram, and others, fine-tuned for healthcare.
  • Industry-leading information security (HITRUST r2, SOC Type II, ISO 27001:2022, and TX-RAMP Level 2 certified), with Spark built to be in compliance with ISO 42001:2023.

Spark reimagines what it looks like to connect to your doctor, while staying true to our mission: needing healthcare can be hard, but getting it shouldn’t be. With Spark, getting to care is easy, convenient, and works for real lives and real schedules. And on the staff side, hours of frustrating manual tasks are taken care of so staff can spend more time with patients.

About Navigator and Fax Transform, powered by Spark

Navigator empowers patients to self-serve with the guided experience of a customer service agent. It brings deep contextual understanding to voice conversations, intelligently switching to SMS, switching languages, handing over to staff, and even following up on dropped calls.

Navigator provides intelligent concierge support to patients, in many languages.

Fax Transform is AI-powered processing and follow-up for paper and electronic faxes. Fax Transform completes manual steps behind the scenes in seconds, parsing discrete data and classifying faxes so staff simply need to verify.

Real-World Outcomes with Spark

University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS) saw amazing outcomes with Luma’s Navigator within one month: 

  • 98 manual call center staff hours saved/eliminated
  • 95% of phone calls completely automated
  • 82% patient verification success rate
  • 1,200 cancellations processed without any human interaction

“We were looking for efficiency — and we found it with Navigator,” said Michelle Winfield-Hanrahan,  RN, BSN, MHA, MSN,  UAMS’ Chief Clinical Access Officer and Associate Vice Chancellor for Access. “The team was spending three hours daily just listening to patient voicemails and then going in and canceling appointments. Navigator completely took that manual work off our plates. It sounds and acts like a human, and it’s so helpful. Our outcomes have been very positive, and really exceeded what I expected.”

At DENT Neurologic Institute, Fax Transform is saving significant time and effort:

  • 3x faster fax processing
  • 70% time savings on fax workflows

“We receive a lot of faxes – over 500 per day across the organization – and it’s just impossible to keep up with manually,” said Emily Smythe, DENT’s Manager of Quality & Analytics. “Processing a single fax can take up to five minutes. Fax Transform automates it completely, so it takes 10 seconds or less to file a fax.”

The Future of Spark

We’re so excited to make healthcare access easier for patients and their loved ones and free staff up for great interactions. Navigator (patient concierge), Fax Transform (fax automation), and staff-side efficiency tools are available today, with much more coming throughout 2025. 

With Spark, we’ve built the most impactful AI the market has seen yet, one that helps healthcare organizations drive the business with technology, not because of technology. We can’t wait to transform the workflows that our customers have told us are the biggest areas of opportunity – and to continue growing what Spark can do.

Learn more about Spark here: https://www.lumahealth.io/patient-success-platform/ai-spark/.