The agency’s updated fiscal year 2023 AI use case inventory — which is required of agencies under a Trump-era executive order — shows 163 instances of the technology being operated, implemented, or developed and acquired by the agency. HHS’s public inventory for the previous fiscal year had 50 use cases. 

“Artificial intelligence use cases tripling from FY22 to FY23 is indicative of HHS’s commitment to leverage trustworthy AI as a critical enabler of our mission,” HHS’s Chief Information Officer Karl S. Mathias told FedScoop in an email.

The increase in reported uses at the agency comes as the conversations about AI’s possible applications and risks have intensified with the rise in popularity of tools like ChatGPT. The Biden administration, which has made AI a focus, is crafting an executive order to address the budding technology and provide guidance to federal agencies on its use.

The majority of AI tools used by HHS – 47 of them – are managed by the National Institutes of Health, according to FedScoop’s analysis of the data. The FDA manages 44, the second-highest number of uses, and the Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response follows with 25 AI tools.  

Among the new instances reported in the inventory are tools used by NIH for classifying HIV-related grants and predicting stem cell research subcategories of applications, which were both implemented earlier this year. 

Meanwhile, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) is exploring using an AI tool to transcribe cognitive interviews, which are used to evaluate survey questions and offer a detailed depiction of respondents’ meanings. According to the inventory, it plans to compare outputs from OpenAI’s automatic speech recognition system Whisper to those of VideoBank, company that provides tools for management of digital assets such as recordings, and manual transcription.

Also at NCHS, the agency is evaluating a tool from Private AI to identify, redact, and replace personally identifiable information “free text data sets across platforms within the CDC network.” The database states that use is in the development and acquisition phase, though it also includes an implementation date of May 2, 2023.

AI use case inventories are required of federal agencies under a Trump-era executive order (EO 13960) aimed at promoting trustworthy AI in government. Under that order, agencies must review their current and planned AI uses annually, check for compliance with the order, share them with other agencies, and post them publicly.

A recent FedScoop review of large agencies’ handling of those inventories showed that efforts across the federal government have so far been inconsistent, varying in terms of process, what they include, and timelines for publication.

The new HHS inventory offers a more detailed look into the agency’s AI uses than its inventory last year and includes nearly every category required under the Chief Information Officers Council’s more expansive guidance for documenting uses in fiscal year 2023.

The agency’s inventory for fiscal 2022 included the name, agency, and description of each use. The fiscal 2023 inventory includes those categories plus the stage of every use case and whether it was contracted. Some uses also include the dates it was initiated, began development and acquisition, and was implemented. 

A little more than a third, 36%, of HHS’s reported AI uses are in the operation and maintenance phase, 28% are in development and acquisition, 20% are in initiation, and 16% are in implementation. 

One key requirement of the executive order was to bring into compliance or retire uses that didn’t comply with its framework for AI use in government.

In response to an inquiry about any use cases that were retired or abandoned by agencies since the last inventory, Mathias said: “Some artificial intelligence use cases, like other technology projects, have pivoted or are no longer pursued for various reasons, but none have been retired because of lack of consistency with principles of Executive Order 13960 of December 3, 2020.”

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The Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response supports hospitals with personal protective equipment like masks and medicine. So when it had issues distributing the drug remdesivir in July, HHS began asking hospitals to report their supply.

HHS further made its COVID-19 Community Profile Report, an internal tool originally, available to the public in December as a “highly consumable” PDF, as well as an .xlsx file for deeper analysis, said Duvall, who was instrumental in the effort.

“The data had to evolve with how the government was responding to the pandemic,” Duvall said. “Over time, as we got more comfortable with datasets and felt that the quality of the data was good and sound, there was more and more release of open data.”

HealthData.gov‘s look changed in the past week as HHS migrated it to a new platform with additional capabilities — namely machine-readable, API-accessible interfaces for every dataset to assist researchers, companies and journalists.

The separate HHS Protect Public Data Hub and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention COVID Data Tracker represent a year of work.

The hub includes hospital use reporting and data on what therapeutics like Lilly and Regeneron they’ve received. The tracker meanwhile combines CDC guidance with data and links to HealthData.gov.

The downloadable COVID-19 Community Profile Report on HealthData.gov is updated daily. And the PDF contains data on case positivity, deaths and hospital admissions, while the .xlsx breaks things down by states, regions and counties.

Search analytics revealed state data was particularly popular, so HHS now offers a state profile view as well.

Before opening datasets up HHS has to consider the legality, for which general counsel is consulted, and the potential effect on hospitals.

“What is the appropriate level of granularity into what’s going on [without] show[ing] too much that would then be detrimental to hospitals, as well as the patients that are in the facility,” Duvall said. “That’s a hard challenge for the pandemic.”

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The Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response wants information from vendors as it plans for potential procurement, migration and operationalization of leading commercial solutions.

ASPR has yet to implement the federal government’s Cloud Smart strategy released in 2019 to enable its public health emergency response missions and ensure cybersecurity.

“The objective of this requirement is to obtain a secure, flexible, efficient, and cost effective, commercial cloud service offering that enables scaling of infrastructure, application resources, IT capabilities or services to meet evolving application and user demand,” reads the RFI.

Public health emergency response data would be hosted at the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) moderate impact level, meaning its compromise could have a serious adverse effect on operations.

ASPR is interested in services that can track and report cost and performance data for the applications being hosted in any cloud environment. The IT Services Division requires access but not control of monitoring tools.

The desired services must be able to support Amazon Web Services GovCloud, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.

Vendors have until Dec. 24 to respond.

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