The nonprofit Coalition for Health AI (CHAI) has launched an initiative designed to help public health agencies responsibly evaluate, implement and scale generative AI.

OpenAI and Anthropic have donated 10 enterprise licenses, with up to 2,000 seats available for public health practitioners for PULSE (Public health Use case and Learning Scaling Engine).

As part of this initiative, CHAI's leadership council – made up of 17 cross-sector collaborators – will select participating entities, assign individuals to their preferred use-case communities of practice, and work with Accenture's AI and public health experts to manage onboarding and develop playbooks across five key use cases. The playbooks will serve as best practices for other jurisdictions to utilize, systematizing the pockets of excellence at the frontlines in public health, CHAI said. 

"Every major technological transformation succeeds or fails based on trust, governance and execution. Public institutions have the added responsibility of doing so while maintaining transparency and accountability," said David Lakey, M.D., former Texas Health Commissioner, in a statement. "PULSE will support agencies in this endeavor, and is specifically designed for practical implementation – working hand in hand with the professionals that are actively using the generative AI tools."

As public health agencies are under increased pressure to respond faster, analyze more data and communicate more effectively – with limited resources, CHAI said that AI has the potential to transform workflows and efficiencies. PULSE's goal is to accelerate the adoption of generative AI in public health by piloting the most impactful use cases in 10 select jurisdictions, and then translating learnings into playbooks at a national scale.

The jurisdictions selected could include: a state of territorial health department, a local or county health department, a tribal authority or Indian health organization, or a large city health department. Pilots with these 10 jurisdictions will begin this fall. The public launch of the playbooks is expected next year. The use cases are as follows:
• Biosurveillance: Drug Wave Prediction
• Social Determinants of Health (SDoH): SDoH Mapping
• Operations and Efficiency: Community Feedback Analysis
• Public Communications: Multilingual Translation Hub
• Automated Clinical Data Retrieval: FHIR Query Engine

CHAI has more than 3,000 members including health systems, patient advocacy groups, academia, and a wide range of industry start-ups and incumbents