Color's sales and medical affairs teams now answer clinical RFPs from a locked, medically vetted knowledge base.
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A one-week parallel proof of concept, then signed straight after.
Every draft comes from a locked folder only clinical SMEs can edit.
The team loaded a live RFI during its onboarding call.
For Color, a cancer-care company that sells screening and clinical care programs to employers through benefits consultants, RFPs are highly technical and require close collaboration between sales and medical affairs. Its first answer was homegrown AI built in a custom GPT and a Gemini gem, which hallucinated clinical details. After a head-to-head with Tribble, Color chose Inventive AI as its AI RFP tool for healthcare. This case study is based on conversations with Mike Quigg, VP, Strategic Partnerships, and Deanna Brockman, Medical Science Liaison, at Color.
Color is a cancer-care company that delivers screening and clinical care programs to employers, mostly through benefits consultants. It targets mid-market and large enterprises, and its sales and medical affairs teams collaborate on about 50-page technical proposals for every deal.
When the product is a clinical cancer-care program, RFP accuracy is non-negotiable.
Color first tried to automate its RFPs with custom AI assistants, one built as a Gemini gem and another inside a custom GPT project. That approach ran into the limits of replacing a custom GPT for RFPs with something homegrown: the tools hallucinated clinical information, had no verified answer bank and didn't support work between sales and medical affairs.
"Taking the amount of time to do one RFP takes a lot away from the many different tasks they need to do to maintain their pipeline growth... What it doesn't help with or support is the multi-colleague collaboration internally across teams, rather than just Slacking one another all day, every day."
— Mike Quigg, VP, Strategic Partnerships, Color
With a large open pipeline and RFP volume projected to grow from about 25 to 50 a year, Color needed an enterprise platform that wouldn't guess.
Color looked at three or four platforms, including Loopio and Responsive. It needed a platform built for current AI workflows, so it narrowed the field to a live, one-week parallel proof of concept between Tribble and Inventive AI.
The core requirement was an RFP software that doesn't hallucinate, using a true Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) architecture that pulls only from approved medical documents. Inventive AI emerged as the undisputed winner, proving it could eliminate AI guesswork while actively flagging conflicting statistics between source documents for the medical team to review.
During the evaluation, Medical Affairs pressed on exactly that point.
"So this is fully a RAG system, there's no way of hallucinating here?"
— Deanna Brockman, Medical Science Liaison, Color
Color set strict data governance from the start. The knowledge hub syncs from a locked Google Drive folder that only a small group of clinical subject matter experts can edit, so the AI drafts only from medically vetted content.
"Myself and Steph and a very select number of people can be the editor of that drive and that folder. We don't want every single person being able to change what is in the knowledge base."
— Deanna Brockman, Medical Science Liaison, Color
The governance didn't slow the team down. Color was loading a live RFI into Inventive AI before its onboarding and training calls had finished.
With RFP software built into Slack and Salesforce, Inventive AI fits into how Color already sells. Salesforce launches RFP projects automatically through Inventive's integrations, and a Slack bot lets sales reps get vetted answers to follow-up questions after consultant meetings.
The biggest immediate gain was visibility. Instead of losing track of unanswered clinical questions inside one long document, medical affairs and sales assign sections, set deadlines and track progress in one dashboard.
"Imagine if there's hundreds of questions, it'd be hard to just scroll through and make sure that everyone has appropriately finished their section... Yes, this is very helpful."
— Deanna Brockman, Medical Science Liaison, Color
Inventive AI helps healthcare teams answer clinical RFPs with cited answers drawn only from approved content.
Book a demo to see how Inventive AI handles RFPs like Color's.
