Questions by María González Manso, CEO and co-founder of Tucuvi. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Can you tell us about your practice and the patients you serve?
Dr. Solis: I’m based in Riverside, a very diverse community and one of the fastest-growing regions in Southern California. The population has grown exponentially over the last decade, and there are not enough primary care providers to serve it.
I’m part of a medical group of primary care and family medicine providers. We serve a large senior population, and our primary focus is value-based care, which means taking responsibility for our patients’ health throughout the year, not just when they’re sick. We want to treat them as a whole person, so they can live healthier, stay out of the hospital and do the things they enjoy.
Where does traditional healthcare fall short between visits?
Dr. Solis: We’ve built a health system that is able to save lives, put a stent in the heart, and act heroically. We’re good at that kind of medicine here. We’re not so good at preventing hospitalization and illness, and that is something we can really work on and learn from other health systems in the world. We spend more per patient than anywhere else, yet our outcomes for many conditions are lackluster.
Traditional primary care often relies on a snapshot of a patient’s health during an office visit. Blood pressure can be elevated because someone rushed through traffic, drank coffee or missed their morning medications. This is where I feel technology like AI can help: keeping patients connected with us between visits, almost like a coach, so they don’t wait two years before seeing us, when the situation can already be serious. Tucuvi helps us take the pulse of our patients between visits, collecting home readings and reinforcing education so we can make better-informed clinical decisions.
Why did you choose Tucuvi?
Dr. Solis: I wanted to see first-hand how physicians who were already using it worked with it, so I visited health systems in Europe that had been working with Tucuvi for some time. I was completely blown away by how naturally patients took to it, and that helped alleviate some of my anxiety about how my own patients would perceive new technology.
What really convinced me was the heart failure program I saw there. Heart failure is one of those conditions where you want to check on patients regularly, on their weight and on whether they are short of breath, and it leads to some of the costliest hospitalizations. It is also a condition I see a lot in primary care, because our patients often see us more frequently than their specialists, and cardiologists depend on an integrated primary care approach.
When I saw it working in cardiology, I thought it could also help with other conditions that require close monitoring, like diabetes or hypertension, which is where we started. Tucuvi had already worked out many of the nuances: how to make it user-friendly and how to make alerts informative for the clinical team, not overwhelming.
What has surprised you most since you started?
Dr. Solis: The ability to triage. Some of my patients use remote blood pressure monitoring, and the volume of data coming through those devices is not always practical. Your blood pressure can be high because you just walked up the stairs or had coffee that morning. It creates noise.
This technology takes into account the context of the patient, their overall health and their medications, so we get higher quality information that’s actionable. Depending on what it is, it goes to my medical assistant, to the front desk, or to the clinical team when they really need to see it right away. I was hesitant to add something that would just make things harder for us, so that surprised me the most.
It has also changed what we can do with that information. I can identify hundreds of patients needing follow-up based on blood pressure, diabetes control or their last visit. The challenge has always been reaching everyone consistently. Tucuvi gives us the ability to conduct organized, personalized outreach at a scale our existing staff couldn’t realistically achieve alone.
What gave you the confidence that it would work for your patients and your team?
Dr. Solis: Knowing my patients well. They give me feedback on every aspect of their care, from their wait time for an X-ray to how they were treated at a specialist’s office. So I was confident that, as long as they were made aware of what we were trying, they would tell me how it was going.
We rolled it out in an organized way: we let patients know in advance and gave them a short flyer explaining what we were doing and how we would be reaching them. The feedback was really positive. Patients came back telling me they couldn’t believe we cared enough to check in on them and their blood pressure between visits. I remember a patient in her 80s who, together with her daughter, used Tucuvi to report their blood pressure. That showed me that this technology can be accessible to all ages. I see AI as an extension of our clinical team, not a replacement for human relationships.
Confidence also comes from knowing the safeguards are there. I think physician caution is appropriate. What reassures me is understanding the clinical safeguards that can be built into AI workflows. For example, if a patient mentions chest pain during a routine scheduling call, the system needs to recognize that urgency and escalate appropriately. AI offers an opportunity to standardize safety protocols while keeping clinical judgment and human oversight central.
What has changed in the way your team cares for patients?
Dr. Solis: It has changed our mindset. We now plan twelve months ahead: which annual wellness visits our patients will need, what our staffing needs will be each month and how we can accomplish the outreach. It has given us a bird’s-eye view of population health, which is the goal: moving from individual care to thinking about how to best reach your whole patient population.
We also find that some patients need to come in sooner, or more frequently, and may not realize it. Now we have much more visibility into who needs to be seen sooner.
Some physicians worry that AI could make care feel less personal. What has your experience been?
Dr. Solis: It’s a concern we always have with new technologies: will it create distance, or bring us together? I see this technology as a tool that helps us communicate better. Nobody says the telephone made us less personal with our loved ones.
AI gives patients a way to let us know they’re doing okay, or that they’re not. Then our team reaches out to them. Our front desk might contact a patient to say, “We saw your blood pressure was high, and we’d like to see you sooner.” There are ways to combine technology with the personal touch. We’re not trying to have technology take over everything. We’re trying to achieve higher quality communication at the scale that is needed today.
Looking three years ahead, what does AI-supported primary care look like to you?
Dr. Solis: Expanding from one condition to multiple chronic conditions, with AI as the engine that brings together everything we need to monitor. It would help us prioritize patients, see them sooner and prevent hospitalizations, guiding our decisions with a long-term view in line with our mission of value-based care.
I see it as a kind of copilot for our clinic: a central hub for every interaction that happens between visits, from the information patients share with us to the outreach we do to bring them in.
What would you say to a physician who is interested in clinical AI but still hesitant to take the first step?
Dr. Solis: I would advise them to just try it, because at this point we can’t afford not to. Healthcare and technology are changing so rapidly that standing still puts us at a disadvantage in the way we deliver care. It may bring new challenges, but in the long term it will bring us closer to our patients.
And talk to other doctors who are already using it. For me, that is what really made the difference.
Closing the gap between visits
Dr. Solis’s experience shows what changes when a care team can reach every patient between visits: care gaps are closed before they become hospitalizations, clinicians get prioritized, actionable information instead of more data, and planning shifts from the next appointment to the health of the whole panel.
We thank Dr. Solis for sharing his perspective and look forward to expanding this work to more chronic conditions.
