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 reduce the burden of clinical documentation.

WHY IT MATTERS

The VA says it intends to award firm fixed-price contracts to Abridge AI and Nuance Communications to test and evaluate commercial, cloud-based, ambient scribe software in live VA environments.

The administration said it needs software-as-a-service tools to transcribe clinical encounters and generate notes in order to integrate with its electronic health record, and so that doctors can insert visit information "without copy and paste manual effort," according to the July 11 notice.

Moving beyond storing and retrieving data more efficiently to impact people's lives and solve important problems was the spirit behind the tech sprint – Documenting VA Clinical Encounters and Integrating Community Care Data – according to Charles Worthington, VA chief technology officer and chief artificial intelligence officer. 

While the VA has made great strides in cloud and mobile computing that have enabled more veterans to access their benefits and patient information, the agency is on the cusp of a major transition to a new way to deliver software that is about creating inferences or predictions, based on large models and complicated mathematics, Worthington said at an award ceremony on May 21, when the finalists were announced.

"This paradigm is quite different. I think all of the techniques we've used to get to this point we're going to have to rethink because all of those techniques are necessarily applicable to a world where we're generating inferences and using those inferences to deliver outcomes," he said.

Other winners of the Ambient Dictation for Clinical Encounters track 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 could satisfy the requirements can respond to the VA notice, the agency said. 

THE LARGER TREND

The $1 million AI Tech Sprint initiative was first launched this past year with the goal of developing ambient dictation for clinical encounters, as well as an advanced document-processing system for its Community Care program. 

To address provider burdens, the agency is seeking "high fidelity, traceable records of provider encounters" from a platform that can also interoperate with VA health system information. 

Part of the challenge was incorporating advanced software features, like source vetting and an ability to extract structured CPT codes, SNOMED CT codes and/or LOINC codes into medical records and its Summit Data Platform Health Information Exchange.

"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," Dr. Shereef Elnahal, the 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 veteran healthcare at the same time."

Both tracks offered a first-place prize of $300,000, $150,000 for second place and $50,000 for third. More than 150 teams competed across the two tracks, and there were 25 finalists, according to the VA's Office of Research and Development AI Tech Sprint website.

"We could all but eliminate the administrative load that has eroded the quality of doctor-patient conversations and has famously broken the spirit of many clinicians," said Dr. Shiv Rao, a practicing cardiologist and CEO of Abridge, one of the AI contract awardees.

Generative AI can attract the next generation of healthcare workers by simplifying difficult and labor-intensive processes, he told Healthcare IT News last year.

Microsoft subsidiary Nuance, through its long-term partnership with Epic, advanced ambient documentation products with genAI last year. 

"For the first time, we can see how conversational understanding, generative AI, and clinical context can together generate high-quality documentation," Sean Bina, Epic's VP of patient experience, said in the announcement.

ON THE RECORD

"The challenge was a rigorous and competitive evaluation process authorized under the America COMPETES Act and aligned with the directives of Executive Order 14110," said VA officials in its contract notice.

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

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