AHRQ launches $8M health AI competition

A new federal competition aims to accelerate the process of evaluating clinical evidence and support the development of AI applications for research and implementation initiatives.

The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality has introduced the two-part Super Intelligence for Healthcare Improvement Initiative, which will provide a total of $7.95 million in prizes for AI-based approaches to synthesizing medical evidence and creating an ecosystem of AI apps.

The first part of the competition, the Clinical Evidence Synthesis Transformation Challenge, will award a $5.35 million prize for an AI-based method to gather and analyze clinical evidence. The current systematic review process is burdensome and costly, AHRQ said, and using AI to automate the process could help improve the quality of the reviews and make them more cost-effective.

The goal would be to create an operating model to support AHRQ's clinical evidence products, so that instead of "requesting a static report, decision-makers could potentially interrogate a living evidence base, receive alerts when conclusions change, or obtain a specific analysis within hours," the agency said.

The second part, the SI Tech Sprint for Healthcare Research and Implementation Quality and Safety, will provide $2.1 million to create AI-driven apps to leverage AHRQ's cost, utilization and quality databases.

This part of the competition includes two tracks: The SI for Healthcare Research track will support apps that help researchers develop questions, identify AHRQ resources, conduct analyses, reproduce results and communicate findings; while the SI for Implementation Quality and Safety track will support apps that help healthcare stakeholders, including policymakers and providers, use clinical evidence to plan implementations, monitoring and workflow redesign.

"AHRQ is uniquely positioned to turn recent advances in SI into better healthcare," said Gil Alterovitz, Ph.D., chief data officer and chief super intelligence officer at AHRQ, in the press release. "Our national data resources, evidence expertise and focus on care delivery create enormous potential for this initiative. By bringing SI and data leadership together, we can help people get answers and improve care with scientific rigor."

The competition comes as the Trump administration doubles down on AI, or "super intelligence." In a Sept. 29 executive order, President Donald Trump mandated that government departments and agencies use the term "super intelligence" instead of "artificial intelligence," though some question the validity of the term for the era of AI we are currently in.

During his second term, Trump rescinded Biden-era efforts to create guardrails for AI development and has pushed forward internal government efforts to incorporate AI. HHS released a plan late last year detailing its plan to deploy AI within the agency, including centralizing AI tools and resources across departments, creating a governance structure for new tools and using the technology for public health initiatives.

Anuja Vaidya has covered the healthcare industry since 2012. She currently covers healthcare IT and innovation, including artificial intelligence, digital healthcare, EHRs and interoperability.