The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs plans to award new contracts to two winners of this year’s AI Tech Sprint program, designed to help ease the burden of clinical documentation.
WHY IT MATTERS
VA said it intends to award fixed-price contracts to Abridge AI and Nuance Communications to test and evaluate commercial, cloud-based ambient note-taking software in a live VA environment.
According to a July 11 announcement, the administration said it needs software-as-a-service tools to record clinical encounters and create notes for integration with electronic health records, and for physicians to be able to insert visit information “without manual copying and pasting.”
The goal of the technology race — VA Clinical Encounter Recording and Community Care Data Integration — is not just to store and retrieve data more efficiently, but to impact people’s lives and solve important problems, according to Charles Worthington, VA’s chief technology officer and chief artificial intelligence officer.
While VA has made great strides in cloud and mobile computing to help more veterans access benefits and patient information, the agency is on the brink of a major shift to a new way of delivering software that makes inferences or predictions based on large, complex mathematical models, Worthington said at the awards ceremony on May 21, when the finalists were announced.
“This model is quite different. I think we’re going to have to rethink all the techniques that we’ve used to get to this point because all of those techniques need to be applied to a world where we’re making inferences and using those inferences to produce results,” he said.
Other winners in the Ambient Dictation for Clinical Encounters category were Althea Health, ARETUM, Cognosante Military and Veterans Health, Commure, Contrast AI, Credence Management Solutions, DeepScribe, TranscribeMD AI, Knowtex, QuantumTechIT, Sourceree, Tali AI, and Veterans EZ Info.
Any interested party that believes it can meet the requirements may respond to the VA notice, the agency said.
THE BIGGER TREND
The $1 million AI Tech Sprint initiative was first launched last year with the goal of developing ambient dictation functionality for clinical encounters as well as an advanced document processing system for the Community Care program.
To address the burden on providers, the agency is looking for “high-fidelity, traceable records of provider encounters” from a platform that can also interact with VA health system information.
Part of the challenge is incorporating advanced software features, such as source checking and the ability to extract structured CPT codes, SNOMED CT codes, and/or LOINC codes into the medical record and the Summit Data Platform.
“AI solutions can help us reduce the time clinicians spend on non-clinical work, which will free up our teams to do more of what they love most: caring for Veterans,” Dr. Shereef Elnahal, VA Undersecretary for Health, said in a statement when the challenge was announced in November. “This effort will reduce burnout among our clinicians and improve healthcare for Veterans at the same time.”
Both races offered first-place prizes of $300,000, second-place prizes of $150,000, and third-place prizes of $50,000. More than 150 teams competed in both races, with 25 teams making it to the finals, according to the VA Office of Research and Development’s AI Tech Sprint website.
“We can completely eliminate the administrative burden that erodes the quality of doctor-patient conversations and has undermined the morale of many clinicians,” said Dr. Shiv Rao, a practicing cardiologist and CEO of Abridge, one of the AI contract awardees.
Artificial intelligence can attract the next generation of health care workers by simplifying difficult and labor-intensive processes, he said. Healthcare IT News last year.
Microsoft subsidiary Nuance, through a long-standing partnership with Epic, enhanced its ambient documentation products with genAI last year.
“For the first time, we can see how conversational understanding, generative AI, and clinical context can come together to create high-quality documentation,” Sean Bina, Epic’s vice president of patient experience, said in the announcement.
ON PROFILE
“The challenge here is a rigorous and competitive evaluation process mandated by the USA COMPETE Act and consistent with the directives of Executive Order 14110,” VA officials said in the contract announcement.
Andrea Fox is senior editor of Healthcare IT News.
Email: [email protected]
Healthcare IT News is a publication of HIMSS Media.
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