The U.S Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) plays many roles across the healthcare sector, from regulator to customer to innovation supporter. And according to a recently released strategic document, it’s turning to AI to help manage, coordinate and advance its myriad efforts.
The purpose of the strategy, the overview explains before going into detail, is to “set forth an approach and focus areas intended to encourage and enable Department-wide familiarity, comfort, and fluency with AI technology and its potential (AI adoption), the application of best practices and lessons learned from piloting and implementing AI capabilities to additional domains and use cases across HHS (AI scaling), and increased speed at which HHS adopts and scales AI (AI acceleration). . . Given the immense potential for AI to improve health and human services, HHS will leverage AI capabilities to solve complex mission challenges and generate AI-enabled insights to inform efficient programmatic and business decisions, while removing barriers to AI innovation.”
In a blog post at the time of the document’s release, Eric D. Hargan, Deputy Secretary of HHS, pointed to the myriad advances HHS has already made when it comes to AI. “For example, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has been developing a regulatory framework for AI/machine learning (ML)-driven software to provide industry with appropriate safety and effectiveness guidelines . . . (while) the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has collaborated and invested in AI-based projects to discover health solutions across research and medical settings, including using AI to analyze biomedical imaging to diagnose diseases such as COVID-19.”
Moving forward, the agency will be following a broad approach to promoting enterprise-wide AI familiarity, best practices applied across all initiatives and speedier adoption and scaling of those efforts. In particular, the agency’s strategic approach involves prioritizing AI-centered development and applications in funding and regulatory initiatives, as well as driving innovation across the broader national healthcare landscape with an eye toward targeting gap areas that would benefit from government support.
In addition, the strategy explained, HHS will establish the HHS AI Council “to support AI governance, strategy execution, and development of strategic AI priorities across the enterprise.” The Council’s two primary objectives will be to “communicate and champion the Department’s AI vision and ambition” and “execute and govern the implementation of the enterprise AI strategy and key strategic priorities to scale AI across the Department.”
In sum, the document concluded, “this strategy is the first step towards transforming HHS into an AI fueled enterprise.”