The US Department of Health and Human Services recently concluded a 14-week technology sprint known as The Opportunity Project (TOP) Health sprint. 

Launched in the fall of 2018, TOP is the feds’ model for public-private collaboration focused on tackling “complex challenges with data, technology, and agile methods. Teams turn federal open data-datasets and resources freely available and open to the public on Data.gov-into new digital tools. TOP is a design sprint that puts users and people first, while facilitating new collaborations across government, industry, academia, nonprofits, and diverse stakeholders.”

During the sprint, 10 teams developed digital tools that were built with federal data and AI to enhance medical testing, explore new kinds of treatment and improve care via analytics for a variety of diseases. Federal agencies also partnered with private sector organizations on the project, including Microsoft and Oracle. 

In a blog post, HHS CTO Ed Simcox  said, “At HHS, we recognize that Federal government alone cannot solve our most important and complex challenges,” adding, “the TOP Health sprint is a valuable step in leveraging skills from industry with public resources to promote better health outcomes.”

HHS also conducted the project with the Presidential Innovation Fellows (PIF), a program run by the General Services Administration. According to officials, the program’s overall challenge was to answer the question, how can we do better by leveraging standards and emerging technologies?

HHS said the program led to new insights on how sharing federal data with the private sector could be encouraged and monitored. Agencies were “interested in understanding and customizing datasets for various use cases, but were primarily focusing on internal government use.” Moreover, the agency said, the “lightweight collaboration through TOP Health strengthened the intersection of government and industry.”

Joshua Di Frances, executive director of the PIF program, said that this collaboration across agencies and private companies shows there are new avenues for combining open federal data and AI technologies. “Through incentivizing links between government and industry via a bidirectional AI ecosystem, we can help promote usable, actionable data that benefits the American people,” he said.

Several agencies were involved with TOP, including the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, which assembled a large set of invention topics to help inspire prospective inventors, and the Veterans Administration, which offered access to de-identified cancer patients for use in matching to trials/therapeutics and analytical tools for AI and machine learning.