The Coalition for Health AI (CHAI) launched a national initiative Thursday aimed at helping public health agencies across the U.S. responsibly evaluate, implement and scale generative artificial intelligence solutions.
OpenAI and Anthropic donated 10 enterprise licenses as part of the initiative—dubbed PULSE (Public health Use case and Learning Scaling Engine)—which have 2,000 seats available for public health practitioners.
“Public health teams are being asked to do more with less, and AI can help—as long as it's brought in with care and the right guardrails,” said Elizabeth Kelly, Anthropic head of beneficial deployments, in a statement. “That's why PULSE matters: it lets practitioners test these tools in their own environments, with privacy, governance, and responsible use built in from the start. We're glad to contribute the licenses that make that possible.”
Applications for the effort are now open through Aug. 6, and participants will be selected by CHAI’s leadership council. Each of the 10 selected jurisdictions will be able to register up to 200 team members from their agency to join use case communities for the duration of the six-month program, according to PULSE’s website.
Pilots are slated to begin this fall with the following five use cases:
- Biosurveillance: Drug Wave Prediction
- Social Determinants of Health (SDoH): SDoH Mapping
- Operations and Efficiency: Community Feedback Analysis
- Public Communications: Multilingual Translation Hub
- Automated Clinical Data Retrieval: FHIR Query Engine
“The COVID-19 pandemic showed just how critical our public health infrastructure is – years of underinvestment in technology left many agencies without the tools or experience they needed to respond as effectively as they could, and we're seeing the same thing with AI today,” said Brian Anderson, M.D., CHAI CEO, in a statement. “PULSE is designed to help public health agencies build trust, practical experience, and a path to responsible implementation of this powerful technology. We're proud to provide a vehicle for these organizations to share what they learn using leading AI tools in real-world settings, facilitating adoption and helping accelerate responsible innovation that strengthens public health nationwide.”
In late May, the organization released a series of in-depth playbooks aimed at providing health systems with practical guidance and baseline controls for safe and responsible AI implementation.
In September, CHAI partnered with the Joint Commission on the Responsible Use of AI in Healthcare (RUAIH) guidance document, outlining key principles of organizational management for the use of AI in health systems.
Building on the partnership, the Joint Commission also launched an AI certification program in June.
Any healthcare organization may apply for the certification, and interested entities do not have to be accredited by the Joint Commission, CHAI said.