VA launches $1M AI tech challenge to address clinician burnout
As part of ongoing efforts to reduce burnout among healthcare workers, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs is hosting a 120-day Tech Sprint to develop environmental dictation for clinical encounters and an advanced document processing system for its Community Care program.
That system must be able to export standardized, structured data to the VA’s electronic medical records.
WHY IT MATTERS
The Department of Veterans Affairs Discovery, Education and Affiliate Networks Office, in partnership with the National Artificial Intelligence Institute, SimLEARN and the Office of Primary Care, this week announced the government-sponsored artificial intelligence challenge following the release of the latest AI Executive Order from the Biden Administration.
The AI Tech Sprint for Documenting VA Clinical Encounters and Integrating Community Care Data challenge seeks collaborative teams from academia, industry and non-governmental organizations to work with VA experts and stakeholders to pioneer anti-burnout innovations to support the agency health care workers.
According to the agency, reducing burnout is a top priority for the VA as the nation’s largest integrated health care system. The VA is not only responsible for enormous amounts of data, but it also claims to train the largest number of nurses and doctors in the United States.
In addition to “hiring employees at record rates,” the VA said in the announcement reliable AI is critical to “providing more care and more benefits to more veterans than ever before.”
The VA said it needs “high-fidelity, traceable records of healthcare provider encounters” from a platform that can also interoperate with VA health system information.
Such an AI-powered platform that can listen and take notes during medical appointments “must also have a high degree of security, consistent with VA privacy and security standards regarding the protection of patient data,” the report said, while generating patient-centric visit summaries. and adhering to clinical documentation compliance standards.
The second track is for artificial intelligence that supports documentation for health care provided to veterans by community providers and paid for by the agency. Social care services include emergency medical care, home care and hospice, overseas medical care, fertility treatments for service-related conditions and more.
The VA said of the challenge website that it needs a scalable AI-driven system capable of ingesting diverse sources of Community Care records – ranging from patient encounters to complex medical documents – that highlight key events from episodes of care and are searchable.
The system that governs and integrates the Community Care data should be designed to integrate the VA’s CDW Delta Lake and other data sources and “should have advanced entity recognition and medical text summary capabilities that comply with VA sources and business technology monitoring systems,” the agency said. said.
The VA said it needs advanced features such as source control and extracting structured data elements that can be integrated into VA’s EHR and Summit Data Platform Health Information Exchange. These structured data elements may include CPT codes, SNOMED CT codes, and/or LOINC codes.
Registrations close on January 5, 2024 and the sprint starts on January 26. Both tracks offer a first place prize of $300,000, $150,000 for second place and $50,000 for third place.
THE BIG TREND
Earlier this year, the VA awarded millions for AI-powered innovations that could prevent veteran suicide.
ReflexAI used AI to help the Veterans Crisis Line train and maintain a team of responders, while the Battle Buddy app uses conversational AI and content from VA’s Suicide Safety Planning program for daily check-ins. Stop Soldier Suicide’s Black Box Project has developed machine learning models that can identify previously unknown risk patterns and link them to evidence-based, suicide-specific intervention services.
The VA’s new technical sprint efforts fall under President Biden’s new Executive Order on Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence, which aims to reduce harm and maximize AI’s benefits for workers.
The actions “are critical steps forward in the U.S. approach to safe, secure, and trustworthy AI,” the White House said in the executive order. Biden’s order also calls on federal officials to prepare a report on AI’s potential impact on the labor market.
“More action will be needed, and the Administration will continue to work with Congress to pursue bipartisan legislation to help America lead the way on responsible innovation.”
“AI that is implemented responsibly has tremendous potential to benefit our nation’s veterans by improving patient care and the confidence veterans have in the services they receive,” the VA said on its website .
ON THE RECORD
“AI solutions can help us reduce the time physicians spend on non-clinical work, allowing our teams to do more of what they love most: caring for veterans,” said Dr. Shereef Elnahal, the VA undersecretary for health, in a statement. “This effort will reduce burnout among our physicians while improving healthcare for veterans.”
Andrea Fox is editor-in-chief of Healthcare IT News.
Email: afox@himss.org
Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS Media publication.