The Veterans Administration has appointed its first director of artificial intelligence. Gil Alterovitz, Ph.D., formerly a professor in the Division of Medical Sciences/Computational Health Informatics at Harvard Medical School/Boston Children’s Hospital, will lead the VA’s AI work.
The VA is putting AI to work in reducing veterans’ waiting times for appointments. Another application is in suicide prevention: Through the REACH VET program, the VA uses AI to scan medical records and look for signs of vets at high risk for suicide.
A report on the VA website notes that Alterovitz will be working closely with Scott DuVall, who heads up the VA Informatics and Computing Infrastructure (VINCI) to put VA data to work for veterans. An example is the Million Veterans Program (MVP), which has already collected genomic and health data from more than 750,000 consenting veteran volunteers, making it one of the world’s largest genomic databases.
“That is what you need to do optimal AI—a lot of deep knowledge,” Alterovitz said in the report. “AI is key to really taking advantage of that data to help vets and potentially others, as well.”
The VA is working to build systems that can handle increasingly large amounts of data and make it easier to share those assets—in a secure, confidential manner.
The VA story said Alterovitz is now leading a “sprint” within VA that is modeled after a broader Health Tech Sprint that he co-led during his stint as a Presidential Innovation Fellow with Health and Human Services. A major focus of the VA sprint is forging partnerships with outside organizations that specialize in AI.
As co-chair of HL7’s Clinical Genomics Work Group, Alterovitz has been a leader in the FHIR Genomics space and the “Sync for Genes” effort that was launched to complement the Sync for Science (S4S) project.
The goal of S4S is to use HL7’s FHIR standard to allow individuals to access their health data and send it to researchers in support of the All of Us research program. Backed by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT, Sync for Genes was established to expedite the use of standards to enable and improve patients’ ability to share their genomics information.
At the 2016 HL7 Genomics Policy Conference in Washington, D.C., Alterovitz gave a presentation explaining how Sync for Genes would complete the “Ring of FHIR” by enabling genomic data to be shared in the same way that SMART on FHIR apps are starting to ease the sharing of clinical data. Sync for Genes builds upon the S4S pilot program and uses the FHIR Genomics standard developed by the HL7 Clinical Genomics Work Group for reporting clinical genetic and genomic observations, (FHIR Genomics serves as the basis for the specification for the Sync for Genes data format.)
As the first step toward integrating clinical genomics into the point-of-care, Sync for Genes leverages FHIR to communicate information from clinical genomic laboratories in a format for universal use across medicine.
