UMass Chan, Red Cell Partners Collaborate on AI Assurance
The Health AI Assurance Laboratory at UMass Chan Medical School is collaborating with Red Cell Partners, a tech incubator and investment firm, to test and certify AI products aimed at enhancing healthcare innovation and regulatory compliance.
The two-year collaborative agreement is between UMass Chan and McLean, Va.-based Red Cell Partners, which builds and launches technology-led healthcare, national security and cyber startups. The agreement makes UMass Chan an established member of Red Cell’s Partners Advancing Critical Technologies program and allows UMass Chan to evaluate select AI health care products from Red Cell’s portfolio.
“This collaboration enables a rapid yet rigorous pathway to develop, test and evaluate AI tools using real-world clinical data,” said Adrian Zai, M.D., Ph.D., M.P.H., co-leader of the Health AI Assurance Lab, in a statement. Zai is associate professor of population & quantitative health sciences and chief research informatics officer at UMass Chan and serves as director of the data sciences core within the Department of Population & Quantitative Health Sciences and director of the biomedical informatics core in the Center for Clinical and Translational Sciences.
“Our shared goal is to quickly identify which AI tools are safe, effective and ready for real-world healthcare challenges, and which are not,” Zai added. “The partnership with Red Cell is to create a feeder system of AI companies to come to us, establish guidelines on AI assurance on how it is deployed in patient care, and at the same time, to build our business model out to support the industry and determine the turn-around time to make AI startups competitive in healthcare.”
Red Cell will provide select AI healthcare products for UMass Chan to conduct rapid-cycle real-world evaluations at cost. UMass Chan will provide data access through the Center for Clinical and Translational Science’s Research Informatics Core and will receive fee-based reimbursement for services provided.
Timothy Ferris, M.D., M.P.H., is president of the Red Cell’s Healthcare Practice division. He previously served as national director of transformation at National Health Services England, and as CEO of the Massachusetts General Physicians Organization.
“We’re on a mission to make healthcare better. By working together, we’re refining and making the technology that clinicians and hospital systems want,” Ferris said in a statement. “UMass Chan doesn’t just talk the talk of serving the underserved. They do it day in and day out. And those are the types of people that we want to partner with.”
When the AI assurance lab was announced last year, Mass Chan said it would be run in partnership with MITRE and supported through the Technology & Innovation Ecosystem Awards Program managed by the Innovation Institute at the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative, along with $137,000 in matching investments from private investors.
