The US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) released a new Artificial Intelligence (AI) Strategic Plan on January 10, 2025. Unlike the HHS Trustworthy AI Strategy released in 2021, this document contains a comprehensive roadmap for integrating AI across various HHS domains while addressing potential risks, such as algorithmic bias and data privacy concerns. Fundamentally, the plan outlines how AI can transform healthcare, human services, and public health in the United States.
What are the Key Goals of the Plan?
- Fostering the development and adoption of AI to improve people’s lives.
- Ensuring AI is developed and used ethically and responsibly.
- Promoting access to AI technologies and resources.
- Developing workforces capable of effectively and safely using AI.
What are the key themes of the action plan?
HHS organized the actions in the plan into themes, including:
- Expanding the breadth of AI use across the value chain in each domain.
- Modernizing infrastructure to implement AI and support adoption.
- Enhancing collaboration and public-private partnerships to promote AI adoption.
- Clarifying regulatory oversight and coverage/payment determinator processes for AI.
- Providing safety, effectiveness, and bias mitigation guidelines to increase confidence in AI use.
- Promoting data sharing, access, and standards to facilitate AI adoption and innovation.
- Improving training in governance and management of AI.
- Developing and retaining a robust AI talent pipeline.
- Equipping professionals with access to resources and research to support their respective health and human services organizations.
- Using AI to mitigate labor workforce shortages and address burnout and attrition.
What is the significance of the plan?
The HHS AI Strategic Plan encourages stakeholders to embrace AI’s potential while prioritizing ethical considerations and equitable access. The plan aims to ensure the United States is a global leader in the development and adoption of AI.
As AI evolves rapidly, HHS foresees iterating on the plan to stay ahead of developments and address emerging challenges. This stance will involve continuous risk assessment, stakeholder engagement, and the implementation of robust safeguards to ensure ethical and equitable AI use.
Why did HHS release the AI Strategic Plan?
There are several specific reasons HHS released its AI strategic plan.
- The plan serves as a roadmap for safely activating AI adoption in the healthcare sector. Healthcare executives want AI to stretch the industry workforce, automate administrative work, and reduce healthcare system costs. However, vetting AI tools can be challenging for healthcare organizations. The strategic plan provides a framework and guidelines to help organizations implement AI safely and responsibly.
- AI adoption is increasing rapidly across all industries. The plan is a response to the rapid advancements in AI, including generative AI and large language models. For example, by 2024, there were 271 AI use cases across 13 agencies within HHS. The plan also helps the department manage its AI portfolio and build upon synergies between its divisions.
- The Trump administration brought uncertainty to the future of AI policy. The Biden administration released an executive order on AI in 2023, which President Trump said he would repeal. The HHS AI strategic plan represents a commitment to responsible AI deployment in healthcare, even with this uncertainty at the federal level.
What can health plans learn from the HHS AI Strategic Plan?
The HHS AI Strategic Plan provides a framework and roadmap for integrating AI across the United States healthcare system, which health plans can leverage to improve operations and member outcomes. Here are a few ways health plans can utilize the HHS strategic plan:
Understanding the Regulatory Landscape
The plan clarifies the regulatory landscape for AI in healthcare, which can help health plans understand how to comply with existing regulations and anticipate future policy developments. For example, the plan highlights the role of the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) in establishing standards and requirements for AI systems used in healthcare, such as the HTI-1 Final Rule, which aims to increase transparency in AI-enabled decision support tools.
Promoting Trustworthy AI Development and Ethical Use
The plan emphasizes the importance of trustworthy AI and outlines principles and best practices for ethical and responsible AI use, such as fairness, transparency, explainability, and accountability. Health plans can adopt these principles to guide internal AI development and deployment processes.
The plan advocates for risk management frameworks, like the NIST AI Risk Management Framework, to help organizations identify, assess, and mitigate risks associated with AI. Health plans can leverage these frameworks to establish robust AI governance and oversight mechanisms.
Health plans can use the data privacy and security guidelines to protect member data while leveraging AI for data analysis and decision-making. The plan also stresses the importance of compliance with regulations like HIPAA.
Encouraging Innovation and Adoption
The plan encourages health plans to expand the adoption of AI in various functional areas. Those areas may include member intake, claims processing, utilization management, and care coordination.
The plan supports the development of secure sandboxes, environments that allow organizations to experiment with AI applications in a controlled setting before full-scale deployment. Health plans can participate in these initiatives to explore innovative use cases and test the feasibility of AI solutions.
Health plans can leverage the recommendations for public-private partnerships to collaborate with technology providers, research institutions, and other stakeholders to accelerate AI innovation and knowledge sharing.
Promoting Health Equity
The AI strategy emphasizes the importance of health equity in AI deployment. Health plans can use the guidelines and recommendations to ensure AI systems are designed and used in a way that does not perpetuate biases or exacerbate health disparities.
The plan promotes AI to address health disparities, such as improving access to care in underserved communities. Health plans can explore these opportunities to use AI to improve health equity and member outcomes.
Developing Workforce Capabilities
The AI plan encourages an AI-ready workforce. Health plans can leverage the training and upskilling recommendations to educate their staff on AI concepts, ethical considerations, and best practices for implementation and use.
The plan highlights the importance of AI literacy for all healthcare professionals. Health plans can implement training programs to increase awareness and understanding of AI among their workforce, including clinical and non-clinical staff.
By aligning their AI strategies with the HHS AI Strategic Plan, health plans can contribute to the responsible development and deployment of AI in healthcare. Doing so can improve efficiency, care quality, member experience, and health equity while reducing costs.
What AI use cases does the strategic plan explore?
The HHS AI Strategic Plan highlights various impactful AI use cases across domains. Although the plan does not explicitly rank use cases by impact, it emphasizes those with high potential for improving health and human services and critical challenges in the sector. Here are some of the most impactful use cases based on the prominence and potential benefits described in the sources:
Medical Research and Discovery
Predicting and Prioritizing Research Targets and Leads: AI can help researchers sift through massive amounts of data to identify promising targets for drug development and prioritize leads for further investigation. It could significantly accelerate the discovery of new treatments and cures for diseases.
Accelerating Drug and Biologic Development: AI is used in drug design to predict antibody structures, assess protein function, and accelerate protein design. These applications can shorten the time it takes to develop new therapies, potentially leading to faster access to life-saving treatments.
Medical Product Development, Safety, and Effectiveness
Improving Clinical Trial Design and Execution: AI can optimize clinical trial design by identifying ideal trial sites, recruiting representative patient populations, and predicting the likelihood of trial success. These applications can enhance trial efficiency, reduce costs, and improve the quality of data collected.
Healthcare Delivery
Enhancing Diagnostic Accuracy and Efficiency: AI is increasingly used in radiology and pathology to analyze medical images and identify abnormalities. These applications can improve diagnostic accuracy, speed up diagnosis, and free time for more complex tasks.
Predicting and Preventing Adverse Events: AI algorithms can analyze patient data to predict the risk of adverse events, such as hospital readmissions, sepsis, or falls. By identifying high-risk patients, healthcare providers can intervene early and potentially prevent these events.
Personalizing Treatment Plans: AI can support precision medicine initiatives by analyzing patient data, including genetic information, to tailor treatment plans to individual needs and preferences. It can improve treatment effectiveness and reduce the risk of adverse reactions.
Human Services Delivery
Streamlining Application and Eligibility Processes: AI can automate the processing of applications for human services programs, such as SNAP, TANF, or Medicaid. It can reduce administrative burdens, improve efficiency, and speed up access to benefits for eligible individuals and families.
Optimizing Resource Allocation: AI can analyze data to identify areas of high need. Then, it can allocate resources accordingly to help human services organizations target their programs and services more effectively.
Supporting Case Management and Service Delivery: AI-powered chatbots can provide information, answer questions, and guide individuals through complex processes. These applications can improve access to information, enhance client engagement, and free up time for other tasks.
Public Health
Strengthening Disease Surveillance and Outbreak Prediction: AI can analyze real-time data from various sources to identify and track disease outbreaks. By providing early warnings, public health officials can respond more quickly and effectively to contain the spread of infectious diseases.
Improving Public Health Communication and Education: AI can tailor health information to specific populations and deliver it through various channels, such as social media or chatbots. It can improve the reach and effectiveness of public health campaigns. Doing so promotes healthy behaviors and increasing awareness of important health issues.
Cybersecurity and Critical Infrastructure Protection
Enhancing Threat Detection and Response: AI can analyze network traffic to identify and respond to cyberattacks in real time. Doing so improves the security of healthcare data and systems, protecting patient privacy, and ensuring the continuity of critical services.
The HHS AI Strategic Plan recognizes the importance of prioritizing these and other high-impact use cases to unlock the potential of AI in health and human services. It emphasizes a human-centered design approach focused on providing benefits for people who use or receive AI-supported services. The plan also acknowledges the need to address potential risks and ethical concerns associated with AI, encouraging stakeholders to work collaboratively to ensure AI is used safely, responsibly, and equitably.
