HHS Digs into How AI-Based Tools Can Help Battle Diseases | HealthTech Magazine

Leveraging data effectively can go a long way toward improving healthcare outcomes, and emerging technology is setting the stage for the development of digital tools that can help providers improve patient care and decision-making via data.

Recognizing this, the Department of Health and Human Services in January concluded a 14-week technology sprint known as The Opportunity Project (TOP) Health sprint. During the sprint, 10 teams delivered 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 partnered with private sector organizations on the project, including Microsoft and Oracle.

“At HHS, we recognize that Federal government alone cannot solve our most important and complex challenges,” HHS CTO Ed Simcox said in a blog post, 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. This past week, HHS released more information on one of the key challenges the sprint identified: AI approaches for facilitating an experimental therapy ecosystem. The challenge, according to the HHS blog post, sought to answer the question, how can we do better by leveraging standards and emerging technologies?