The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) launched an Artificial Intelligence Tech Sprint on Tuesday, encouraging technologists across the country to develop AI-enabled tools that will reduce the burnout of healthcare workers.
VA hopes to find solutions that can allow clinicians to spend less time on manual tasks, such as taking notes during medical appointments and integrating patients’ medical records. The agency will award the winning teams $1 million in total prizes.
“AI solutions can help us reduce the time that clinicians spend on non-clinical work, which will get our teams doing more of what they love most: caring for veterans,” VA Under Secretary for Health Dr. Shereef Elnahal said in an Oct. 31 press release. “This effort will reduce burnout among our clinicians and improve veteran health care at the same time.”
This effort is part of President Biden’s new AI executive order and the VA’s efforts to use trustworthy AI solutions to improve veteran health care and benefits.
The VA said proposals for the AI Tech Sprint should look to address one or more of the two focus areas: “speech-to-text solutions for use in medical appointments, and document processing to reduce the time needed to integrate non-VA medical records into patients’ VA record.”
The 120-day tech sprint is seeking collaborative teams from academia, industry, and non-governmental organizations to work alongside the VA. Innovators will have until Jan. 5, 2024, to submit their proposals, and they can do so on the AI Tech Sprint website.
