AI Tutors for Empathy: SanLuca's New Platform Trains Clinical Staff

SAN FRANCISCO, CA – May 05, 2026 – Health technology firm SanLuca today announced a pioneering partnership with Community Health Network to launch its new Palliative Care product suite, an artificial intelligence platform designed to teach one of the most delicate skills in medicine: communicating with seriously ill patients.

Community Health Network, a major Indianapolis-based system, will be the first to deploy the technology in a clinical setting. The collaboration introduces AI-powered training simulations that allow clinicians to practice and refine their communication skills for end-of-life and serious illness conversations. This move signals a significant shift toward using technology to scale empathy and consistency in patient care, tackling a challenge that has long vexed medical education.

Through the partnership, clinical teams at Community will gain access to on-demand, individualized training modules featuring realistic patient scenarios. This approach bypasses the logistical and financial hurdles of traditional, resource-heavy live training sessions, offering a scalable solution to equip a large workforce with crucial, human-centered skills.

The Challenge of the 'Hardest Conversation'

Discussing prognosis, treatment limitations, and end-of-life wishes remains one of the most emotionally and technically difficult tasks for any healthcare provider. While research consistently shows that effective communication can reduce patient distress, improve quality of life, and ensure care aligns with a person's values, clinicians often receive limited formal training in this area. The result can be conversations that feel rushed, clinical, or incomplete, leaving patients and families feeling unsupported during their most vulnerable moments.

"Serious illness communication is one of the most human parts of medicine, yet it's often the hardest to teach and scale," shared Melissa Forde, BSN, RN, SEP, and Palliative Care Product Lead at SanLuca, who was instrumental in developing the curriculum. "This work captures the lived experience, wisdom, and nuance clinicians carry with them, and translates it into something that can support thousands more. If we can help clinicians feel more prepared in these moments, we can fundamentally change how patients and families experience care."

SanLuca’s platform aims to create a safe, repeatable environment for this preparation. By providing structured training paired with simulated practice, the system is designed to build a clinician's confidence and competence before they enter a real patient's room. This addresses a fundamental gap in medical training, where such skills are often learned through observation or trial-and-error in high-stakes situations.

How AI Simulates Empathy

At the core of SanLuca's offering is an interactive experience that blends evidence-based lessons with AI-driven simulations of patients and their family members. The platform provides real-time coaching and feedback, guiding clinicians through complex conversational pathways. The curriculum is built around key competencies, including establishing rapport, assessing a patient's understanding of their illness, discussing prognosis and uncertainty, and, most critically, exploring personal values to align care with what matters most to the patient.

SanLuca, which rebranded from Solara Health in 2023, is positioning itself as a "clinician-first AI platform." The company has previously emphasized its commitment to responsible AI, having launched an "Enhanced AI Governance Framework" in 2025 to ensure its technology is transparent, secure, and human-validated. This framework is designed to avoid opaque "black box" algorithms, a common concern in medical AI, by ensuring its tools support, rather than supplant, clinical judgment.

The broader field of AI in palliative care is still nascent, with experts navigating a delicate ethical balance. While the technology holds promise for personalizing support and training, concerns about data privacy, algorithmic bias, and the potential for dehumanizing care persist. SanLuca's model, which focuses on training and simulation rather than direct patient interaction, appears designed to leverage AI's strengths while keeping the human clinician firmly at the center of the care relationship.

A Strategic Partnership for Scalable Care

The collaboration with Community Health Network is a strategic move for both organizations. For SanLuca, it provides a crucial real-world deployment within a respected health system, offering an opportunity to validate its platform's effectiveness and gather data for future refinement. For Community, it represents an investment in standardizing and scaling high-quality care.

Randy Womack, CEO of SanLuca, highlighted the strength of the partnership. "Our partnership with Community is anchored by the exceptional strength of its Palliative Care program, which leads the field in compassionate, evidence-based care," he stated. Womack framed the investment in such training as a high-value proposition for any health system, noting, "When providers are trained in serious illness communication, patients and families feel more supported, families carry less burden, and care is more likely to reflect patient wishes."

This sentiment was echoed by Community's leadership. "Being an early partner to leverage SanLuca's platform allows us to bring scalable, evidence-based communication training into our clinical environments, helping our teams deliver more consistent, compassionate, and coordinated care across the continuum," said Patrick McGill, MD, President and CEO at Community Health Network.

Backed by venture capital firms like Define Ventures and SemperVirens Venture Capital, SanLuca's business model is predicated on helping health systems achieve greater efficiency and financial sustainability. By using AI to scale services that have traditionally been difficult and costly to expand, the company aims to reduce care fragmentation and lower the total cost of care without increasing administrative burdens on already strained clinical staff.

The Future of Integrated, AI-Supported Healthcare

The Palliative Care suite is not a standalone product but an extension of SanLuca's broader mission to integrate behavioral health into longitudinal chronic condition management. The platform's architecture is designed for what the company calls "rapid configuration," suggesting a long-term strategy to expand into other specialty lines where communication and integrated care are paramount.

This approach reflects a growing industry trend toward creating more holistic and continuous models of healthcare delivery. By embedding AI-enabled tools directly into clinical workflows, SanLuca hopes to extend the capabilities of clinicians, support better triage and follow-up, and ultimately create a more scalable and financially sound healthcare system.

As health systems nationwide grapple with workforce shortages and rising costs, solutions that promise to enhance clinical skills efficiently are gaining significant attention. The success of this partnership between SanLuca and Community Health Network could serve as a powerful proof point for the role of AI in augmenting, rather than replacing, the essential human elements of medicine.