“We hear more and more about people being concerned about getting too innovative in the healthcare space, and a desire for guardrails to help channel that innovation appropriately,” Tripathi said Tuesday. HHS components — like the National Institutes of Health, the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, the Centers for Disease Control, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid and the Food and Drug Administration — have found a wide array of AI use cases. As with other agencies, creating internal chatbots to help HHS employees sift through large volumes of diverse data is a popular use case for HHS, but Tripathi notes that major commercial players, such as Meta’s Llama and OpenAI’s ChatGPT, are not trained on clinical data.

Tripathi said HHS is looking to leverage the vast troves of clinical data across HHS and other agencies to create finely-tuned AI models tailored to healthcare uses. 

HHS’ newly reorganized policy arm is getting a new digital service division to provide digital and technical expertise across its various operating and staff divisions, Assistant Secretary for Technology Policy/National Coordinator for Health IT Micky Tripathi said Thursday at the Health IT Summit in Rockville, Maryland. “We will have teams that will provide digital services and technical assistance to all of our operating and staffing divisions so that they don’t have to worry about going out and hiring teams for that kind of expertise,” said Tripathi, who will oversee the division. “They will be on demand and will help with consulting and the enablement of technologies.” As part of the realignment of the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC), Tripathi now oversees a division that comprises the CTO, who then oversees the chief AI Officer and the CDO. This reorganization reflects a shift in how HHS approaches technology in areas such as product development, data strategy and AI across the entire agency.

In-person appointments are not the only way patients can access care nowadays. Per 2023 data from the Assistant Secretary for Technology Policy/Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ASTP), 87% of office-based clinicians used telehealth in 2021, the most recent year for which there is complete data.

HHS, through the Assistant Secretary for Technology Policy/Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ASTP), has announced two awards totaling $2 million under the Leading Edge Acceleration Projects in Health Information Technology funding opportunity. LEAP in Health IT awardees aim to create methods and tools to advance care delivery, research capabilities and health IT interoperability.

The Assistant Secretary for Technology Policy and Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ASTP) is awarding $2 million to two organizations as part of its LEAP in Health IT program, which seeks to create methods and tools to improve care delivery, advance research capabilities, and address emerging challenges related to interoperable health IT. ASTP had sought applications for two areas of interest: (1) develop innovative ways to evaluate and improve the quality of health care data used by artificial intelligence (AI) tools in health care, and (2) accelerate adoption of health IT in behavioral health settings. “AI and behavioral health are two high-priority areas for HHS. We hope that the funding each awardee receives supercharges their entrepreneurial spirit and positions them to make a real impact in people’s lives,” said Steve Posnack, principal deputy assistant secretary for technology policy, in a statement. “We are cheering them on and look forward to their future results.”