The era of artificial intelligence (AI) is here. AI is everywhere, dominating headlines and conversations as AI and machine learning (ML) technologies rapidly advance toward adoption.
Federal spending on AI has increased to record levels, with the Biden administration’s fiscal year 2024 budget calling for billions more, while AI-related legislation is proliferating rapidly in Congress. Federal agencies and mission partners are already hard at work deploying AI-powered solutions to support a wide range of missions.
For example, as the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) begins using AI tools to reduce health care worker burnout in health care facilities, both VA’s MAVERIC Informatics Group and the National Artificial Institute will use medical imaging AI. said Dr. Raphael Flix, Associate Director of . Intelligence Institute, described in MeriTalk.How federal agencies can take the next step with AI/ML” Webinar will be held on January 9th.
Flix said President Biden’s recent AI executive order directed the Department of Veterans Affairs to conduct AI technology sprints twice a year.
“We’re currently planning and preparing and about to actually begin one of our first technology sprints centered around reducing provider burnout,” Flix said. “This is burnout, especially for all the doctors, nurses and staff who deal with patients.”
“One of the key things we heard in talking to these staff members and working with various offices within the VA is that we are currently unable to document patient encounters or receive other documentation. “There’s a lot of overhead in making sure everything is traceable,” he said.
Flix explained that there are two tracks to leveraging AI to reduce provider burnout across the VA. First, the AI interprets the dictation of its surroundings. Whether it’s a conversation between a patient and a provider, or a doctor who wants to dictate notes after a consultation.
Next, VA is focused on leveraging AI tools within its community care programs. When the VA is unable to provide care to a veteran, they often send the veteran into the community for specialized medical care, Flix explained. But when patients return to VA, they still have health records from appointments with outside providers that VA must integrate back into its systems. Flix says AI can help with this task.
The Veterans Administration also uses AI for small but powerful tasks such as customer service, Flix explained. In 2019, the department established the National AI Institute, which works across various offices to improve processes for veterans.
“In terms of using AI and ML for customer service, we are using these generative technologies, chatbots, and more to help veterans navigate our services and explore how they can benefit. It goes back to the low-hanging fruit in the sense that you want to, help them understand the process better,” Flix said.
Specifically, VA is leveraging AI to address the “real pain point” for veterans: transitioning from the military to the VA health care system.
“These are places where AI can play a force multiplier role,” Flix said. “While it doesn’t immediately make life-or-death medical decisions, it certainly helps us review cases more quickly and, hopefully, treat veterans more quickly.”
“Of course, all decisions made by the AI are manually reviewed,” Flix added. “This is to ensure that there is an explanation as to why the decision was made… after all. [AI] It’s not meant to replace staff decision-making, but to help them make decisions faster. We’re not at the point where we’re actually kicking humans out of the picture. We just want to be able to reach all of our veterans in a timely manner. ”
There are many use cases for AI across the federal government. Recent government accountability reports tally approximately 1,200 cases.
“Federal agencies are enthusiastic about AI,” said George George, a US solutions architect. REI system – Collaborate with federal agencies to optimize business processes and innovate with AI and ML.
To get the most value from AI tools, George advised agencies to: MeriTalk special report released on January 9th “Assess and clearly identify your goals. Identify applications that improve the experience for customers, citizens, and staff, and address pain points with intelligent automation. To ensure ethical and responsible use of AI. , ensuring governance with appropriate guardrails.”
George shares specific success stories such as the Internal Revenue Service using AI and ML to identify tax evasion patterns, and the Department of Homeland Security and National Security Agency applying both technologies to improve cybersecurity with predictive algorithms. He cited national security use cases such as detecting threats.
Imran Chaudhri, Chief Architect, Healthcare and Life Sciences mark logic The company, which works with federal agencies to simplify complex data, said its generative AI systems raise “several important issues that need to be addressed very carefully.”
These include “hallucinations that confidently provide plausible but false data 15 to 20 percent of the time.” In human terms, these are things like misremembering, creativity, and lies,” Chaudhry said. “Other AI model issues include biases based on bad data, inference errors, knowledge blockages, and struggling with certain tasks.”
Finally, I said that a good way to use AI responsibly and effectively is to simply use it more. “The generative space is booming,” and federal agencies should consider adding generative AI to areas such as personal data knowledge management, conversational services and communications, and content design and generation, Chaudhry said. said.
“The federal government has vast amounts of private data,” he said, adding, “Understanding data through knowledge management, intelligent synthesis, natural language exploration, and discovery of this private data can improve government capabilities and “It means greater efficiency.”
Watch MeriTalk’s “How Federal Agencies Take Next Steps with AI/ML” webinar on demand heredownload our concurrent special report on AI/ML here.