With a $555,000 award from Massachusetts' Technology & Innovation Ecosystem Awards Program and a private sector match, the MITRE Corporation will partner with the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School to run the Health AI Assurance Laboratory, the MassTech Collaborative announced Wednesday.

WHY IT MATTERS

The lab aims to contribute to emerging national standards for digital health technology evaluation, foster the trustworthy and responsible use of health AI, and support commercial applications for healthcare innovators, the collaborative said.

While the funds will also support the construction of physical spaces that will allow for collaboration, workforce training, and research and development focused on ensuring the safety of health AI products before they’re put into general use, the lab's mission also includes creating workforce development opportunities. 

For high school, undergraduate and post-graduate students looking to break into AI, MITRE and UMass's new health AI lab will provide hands-on experience and a chance to hone their AI assurance skills.

With the leadership of the researchers at UMass Chan and MITRE, the new lab will help strengthen the health AI industry, according to Yvonne Hao, secretary of the Executive Office of Economic Development and co-chair of the state’s AI strategic taskforce.

"The new Health AI Assurance Laboratory is an incredible opportunity to grow the AI ecosystem by building strategic partnerships and providing career opportunities to students in data analysis, informatics and machine learning," Hao said in a statement.

THE LARGER TREND

In March, MITRE opened its first AI Assurance and Discovery Lab in McLean, Virginia, with a mission to discover and mitigate critical risks in AI-enabled systems.

"Providing an independent assessment of the security, safety and efficacy of AI systems will play a critical role toward helping government and business integrate new technology," Charles Clancy, MITRE senior vice president and chief technology officer, said at the Virginia headquarters opening.

"This lab will demonstrate a repeatable engineering approach and infrastructure that could serve as a blueprint for a national network of AI assurance facilities,” he added.

Certification will be an important part of responsible AI deployment, because disruptive technologies inherently deliver organizations a new spate of risks.

In addition to MITRE, HITRUST launched an AI assurance initiative for healthcare in October.

The HITRUST AI Assurance Program is designed to help organizations deploying AI to engage more proactively and efficiently with their AI service providers and discuss approaches to shared risk.

"Risk management, security and assurance for AI systems requires that organizations contributing to the system understand the risks across the system and agree how they together secure the system," said Robert Booker, chief strategy officer at HITRUST, in its announcement.

ON THE RECORD

"Together with MITRE and with support from the Innovation Institute at MassTech, current and future healthcare professionals will be able to create and guide AI technology to fulfill its promise of better, more efficient and more equitable patient care across our communities," Michael Collins, chancellor of UMass Chan Medical School, said in a statement.

"Having just opened MITRE’s national AI Assurance & Discovery Lab in northern Virginia, we look forward to sharing our AI assurance resources and expertise with the UMass team," added Doug Robbins, vice president at MITRE.

"Connecting both labs will be the very first step in creating what we envision as a national network of AI assurance labs," he said.

Andrea Fox is senior editor of Healthcare IT News.
Email: afox@himss.org
Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS Media publication.