Micky Tripathi: ASTP Getting a New Digital Service

Department of Health and Human Services’ newly reorganized policy arm is getting a new digital service division to provide digital and technical expertise across its various operating and staff divisions, Assistant Secretary for Technology Policy/National Coordinator for Health IT Micky Tripathi said Thursday at the Health IT Summit in Rockville, Maryland.

“We will have teams that will provide digital services and technical assistance to all of our operating and staffing divisions so that they don’t have to worry about going out and hiring teams for that kind of expertise,” said Tripathi, who will oversee the division. “They will be on demand and will help with consulting and the enablement of technologies.”

As part of the realignment of the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC), Tripathi now oversees a division that comprises the CTO, who then oversees the chief AI Officer and the CDO. This reorganization reflects a shift in how HHS approaches technology in areas such as product development, data strategy and AI across the entire agency.

Strategic Focus on AI and Policy

The department has increasingly focused on AI, particularly in the wake of advancements like generative AI and recent federal executive orders that emphasize responsible AI development and governance.

Tripathi, who also serves as acting chief AI officer, said the role will be focused on several priorities including standardizing the use of AI and creating new policies around how to treat across the public health sector.

“We want to have uniform policies about things like the uses of gen AI in peer review processes, for example,” he said. “If one operating division like NIH has a policy on that, we want to make sure that that’s consistent across the entire department.”

Tripathi noted that prior to the reorganization, only three people at HHS were focused on AI — two of whom had joined shortly before the restructuring. Now, AI policy and implementation have become central to the department’s broader technology strategy.

“It was already an underfunded activity. … We need to be able to consolidate more of these resources, make the most efficient use of the staff that we have, but we need more resources to be able to do this,” he said.

Supporting Agency Missions

HHS, one of the largest federal departments, encompasses a vast array of responsibilities, including health care delivery. Tripathi highlighted that the department is not just a regulator, but also a health care provider through agencies like the Indian Health Service.

Coordinating technology initiatives across such a diverse range of missions is challenging.

“The department is more than the sum of its parts, and so as we have more and more investments in technology, information technology and in AI, we want to make sure that we’re getting the synergy across those agencies,” he said.

Tripathi cited ever-evolving policies including U.S. Core Data for Interoperability (USCDI) and TEFCA as some of the key ways the agency can scale AI.

“Everything that we’re doing with respect to USCDI and TEFCA is enriching that fertile field of data,” he said. “We want these AI tools to draw on that data to be able to provide a richer set of services to benefit patients.”