VHA’s AI Chief Led NIH’s New AI RFI

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is exploring capabilities for “data-science-driven analytics through semi-autonomous AI agents to fully autonomous, self-documenting biomedical AI beings,” according to the agency’s new RFI it released June 3.

A key leader of that plan was Gil Alterovitz, who served as the agency’s inaugural chief AI officer for a brief three-month stint before returning to the Department of Veterans Affairs.

NIH’s plan hints at a desire to harmonize artificial intelligence initiatives across other health agencies while the Department of Health and Human Services undergoes a massive organizational transformation.

“For the first time, AI efforts across the NIH will be unified to promote collaboration, reduce duplication and speed up learning across the agency. This coordinated approach will align NIH initiatives with those of other federal agencies — including CMS, FDA, CDC and ARPA-H — to shorten the ‘bench to bedside’ timeline, strengthen American leadership in AI and advance human flourishing, economic competitiveness and national security,” NIH told GovCIO Media & Research in a statement.

The RFI seeks public feedback on actions that should shape the forthcoming NIH AI Strategic Plan and its early one-year action plan.

VHA CAIO Plays Leading Role

During his brief time at NIH, Alterovitz served as senior advisor to NIH’s Director and as the agency’s inaugural chief AI officer who led development of the RFI.

Alterovitz has since returned to his role at the Veterans Health Administration as CAIO to support a “special project” at VA, according to LinkedIn.

Alterovitz has been the face of AI at VA leading up to the government-wide transformation over AI. He led key efforts like the 2022 AI Bill of Rights created in consultation with major federal agencies. This included considerable input and expertise drawn from VA’s National Artificial Intelligence Institute — which Alterovitz led — as well as with feedback from the American public.

The RFI Aligns with HHS’ AI Push

The Trump administration has directed federal agencies to maximize AI use and innovation through a series of orders and memos.

The orders established a “high-impact AI” category for use cases with potential risks to public rights or safety, tying into NIH’s recent RFI, which is requesting information on high-impact use cases for AI in biomedical discovery, public health protection and clinical decision-support.

“The AI revolution has arrived, and we will be the cutting-edge agency using this technology to manage health care data more efficiently and securely, and to give Americans control over their own health,” HHS Secretary Robert Kennedy said at a May 14 Senate budget hearing.

The RFI follows HHS’ massive recent reorganization in line with its “Make America Healthy Again” overall plan, with a new focus on artificial intelligence development.

“We are very, very aggressively implementing AI, and I think we’re going to do it faster and better than anybody else in government, any other agency,” Kennedy said. “We brought very, very high-quality caliber people from Silicon Valley … We can shorten clinical trials. We can. We can get rid of animal trials, which we’re already doing.”

“What we’re saying is, let’s organize [HHS] in a way that it can quickly adopt and deploy all these opportunities we have to really deliver high-quality health care to the American people,” Kennedy said.

NIH is seeking responses to the RFI by July 15.