The Coalition for Health AI (CHAI) on Thursday launched a national initiative aimed at helping public health agencies across the United States responsibly evaluate, implement, and scale generative artificial intelligence solutions.
OpenAI and Anthropic donated 10 enterprise licenses as part of an initiative called PULSE (Public health Use case and Learning Scaling Engine). This license has 2,000 seats available for public health workers.
“Public health teams are being asked to do more with less, and AI can help them do that, as long as it is deployed with caution and appropriate guardrails,” Elizabeth Kelly, head of beneficial deployment at Anthropic, said in a statement. “That’s why PULSE is so important. It allows practitioners to test these tools in their own environments, with privacy, governance, and responsible use built in from the start. We’re happy to provide the license to make that possible.”
Applications for the initiative are currently being accepted until August 6, and participants will be selected by CHAI’s Leadership Council. According to the PULSE website, each of the 10 selected jurisdictions will be able to enroll up to 200 team members from their jurisdiction to participate in the use case community during the six-month program period.
Pilots will begin this fall with five use cases:
- Biosurveillance: Predicting drug waves
- Social Determinants of Health (SDoH): SDoH Mapping
- Operations and Efficiency: Community Feedback Analysis
- Public Communication: Multilingual Translation Hub
- Automated clinical data acquisition: FHIR query engine
“The COVID-19 pandemic has shown us how critical our nation’s public health infrastructure is. After years of underinvestment in technology, many government agencies lacked the tools and experience needed to respond as effectively as possible, and the same is happening today with AI,” CHAI CEO Brian Anderson, MD, said in a statement. “PULSE is designed to help public health organizations build trust, practical experience, and support the path to responsible implementation of this powerful technology. We are proud to provide a means for these organizations to share their learnings using cutting-edge AI tools in real-world settings, helping accelerate adoption and responsible innovation that strengthens public health nationwide.”
In late May, the organization released a series of detailed playbooks aimed at providing health systems with practical guidance and baseline controls for safe and responsible AI adoption.
In September, CHAI partnered with the Joint Commission on the Responsible Use of AI in Health Care (RUAIH) guidance document to outline key principles for organizational governance of the use of AI in health systems.
Building on this partnership, the Joint Commission also launched an AI certification program in June.
According to CHAI, any medical institution can apply for certification, and interested organizations do not need to be accredited by the Joint Commission.
