VA Awards AI Contract to Abridge and Nuance to Reduce Burnout
The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs plans to award new contracts to two winners of this year’s award. AI Technology Sprint program designed to reduce the burden of clinical documentation.
WHY IT MATTERS
The VA says it plans to award fixed-price, fixed-term contracts to Abridge AI and Nuance Communications to test and evaluate commercial, cloud-based, ambient scribe software in live VA environments.
The government said it needs software-as-a-service tools to transcribe clinical encounters and generate notes to integrate with its electronic health record, and so that doctors can enter visit information “without manual copy and paste,” according to the July 11 release. notification.
According to Charles Worthington, VA’s Chief Technology Officer and Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer, the idea behind the tech sprint was to go beyond storing and retrieving data more efficiently to impact people’s lives and solve important problems. It was to document VA clinical encounters and integrate community care data.
While the VA has made great strides in cloud and mobile computing, giving more veterans access to their benefits and patient data, the agency is on the verge of a major transition to a new way of delivering software that revolves around making inferences or predictions based on large models and complicated mathematics, Worthington said at a award ceremony on May 21, when the finalists were announced.
“This paradigm is very different. I think we need to rethink all the techniques we’ve used to get to this point, because all of those techniques are necessarily applicable in a world where we generate inferences and use those inferences to deliver results,” he said.
Other winners of the Ambient Dictation for Clinical Encounters track included Althea Health, ARETUM, Cognosante Military and Veterans Health, Commure, Contrast AI, Credence Management Solutions, DeepScribe, TranscribeMD AI, Knowtex, QuantumTechIT, Sourceree, Tali AI, and Veterans EZ Info.
Any interested party that believes it can meet the requirements may respond to the VA’s notice, the agency said.
THE BIGGER TREND
The $1 million AI Tech Sprint initiative was first launched last year with the goal of developing ambient dictation capabilities for clinical encounters, as well as an advanced document processing system for the Community Care program.
To ease the burden on health care providers, the agency is aiming for “highly reliable, traceable records of provider encounters” through a platform that can also interface with information across the VA health care system.
Part of the challenge was integrating advanced software features such as source control and the ability to extract structured CPT codes, SNOMED CT codes, and/or LOINC codes from medical records and the Summit Data Platform Health Information Exchange.
“AI solutions can help us reduce the time clinicians spend on nonclinical work, allowing our teams to do more of what they love most: caring for veterans,” Dr. Shereef Elnahal, the VA’s assistant secretary for health, said in a statement when the challenge was announced in November. “This effort will reduce burnout among our clinicians while improving veteran care.”
Both tracks offered a first place prize of $300,000, $150,000 for second place and $50,000 for third place. More than 150 teams competed in the two tracks and there were 25 finalists, according to the VA’s Office of Research and Development AI Tech Sprint website.
“We could virtually eliminate the administrative burden that has damaged the quality of doctor-patient conversations and broken the morale of many clinicians,” said Dr. Shiv Rao, a practicing cardiologist and CEO of Abridge, one of the winners of the AI contract.
Generative AI can attract the next generation of healthcare workers by simplifying difficult and labor-intensive processes, he said Healthcare IT News last year.
Microsoft subsidiary Nuance, through its long-standing partnership with Epic, developed advanced environmental documentation products with genAI last year.
“For the first time, we can see how conversational understanding, generative AI, and clinical context can come together to generate high-quality documentation,” said Sean Bina, VP of patient experience at Epic, in the announcement.
ON THE RECORD
“The challenge was a rigorous and competitive evaluation process authorized under the America COMPETES Act and aligned with the guidelines of Executive Order 14110,” VA officials said in their contract notice.
Andrea Fox is Editor-in-Chief of Healthcare IT News.
Email address: afox@himss.org
Healthcare IT News is a publication of HIMSS Media.
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