National initiative launches to help public health agencies implement AI
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The Coalition for Health AI will select 10 state, local and tribal jurisdictions to participate in an AI pilot program to help develop playbooks on the technology.
Public health systems carry out crucial work to ensure the health and well-being of communities, such as surveilling population data for outbreaks, offering vaccination services and maintaining emergency medical services. A new national initiative aims to further support that work by helping public health agencies pilot and scale artificial intelligence tools.
Across the U.S., state and local health agencies are grappling with massive budget cuts, such as the Trump administration’s move to cut $12 billion in public health funding early last year, as well as staffing constraints caused by fewer people entering the public health workforce.
Amid such challenges, AI could serve as a force multiplier to streamline workflows, optimize data insights and detect public health threats, particularly as public health agencies often lack the capacity to undergo major AI implementations independently, said Lucy Orr-Ewing, chief of staff and head of policy at the Coalition for Health AI.
Plugging AI knowledge and implementation gaps is the goal of the Public Health Use Case and Learning Scaling Engine — or PULSE — initiative, which will support 10 state, local and tribal jurisdictions across the U.S. with evaluating, implementing and scaling generative AI tools, according to an announcement last week from CHAI.
After an initial six-month pilot phase, participating jurisdictions will turn their findings into AI playbooks that will be publicly available to other states and localities. The playbooks will include best practices for AI implementation across five public health use cases: biosurveillance, mapping social determinants of health, community feedback analysis, multilingual translations and clinical data management.
The initiative looks to satiate states and localities’ “appetite” to harness the technology, or at least receive help getting started with the process, Orr-Ewing said. In fact, about 40% of local health departments report that they are not currently using AI but are interested in doing so in the future, according to the National Association of County and City Health Officials.
Under the PULSE initiative, participants will have access to enterprise licenses provided by OpenAI and Anthropic that can serve up to 2,000 public health practitioners, Orr-Ewing explained. The technology consulting company Accenture will also offer AI and public health expertise to participants with developing the playbooks. Applications are due Aug. 7.
The COVID-19 pandemic and recent outbreaks of illnesses like the cyclospora parasite and measles gave everyone “a glimmer of hope of what public health could feel like or look like” if public health agencies had adequate data and IT infrastructure to leverage more advanced technologies like AI, she said.
“It takes like a fault or a challenge in public health for people to realize that data and AI [aren’t] where they should be to be able to respond preventatively,” Orr-Ewing said, adding that initiatives like PULSE can help “bring that investment and focus [on public health AI] much sooner [to] save everyone money and save everyone fear and anxiety.”