The University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School and the incubator at Red Cell Partners will soon test and certify healthcare artificial intelligence products under a two-year collaborative agreement that allows university researchers to evaluate select healthcare AI products from the firm’s investment portfolio.
WHY IT MATTERS
With UMass Chan becoming an established member of Red Cell’s Partners Advancing Critical Technologies program, the university’s Health AI Assurance Laboratory will begin testing and certifying AI products aimed at enhancing healthcare delivery and regulatory compliance.
Red Cell builds and launches technology-led healthcare, national security and cyber startups, according to Wednesday’s announcement. Partnering with the firm will create a pipeline for UMass Chan to evaluate health AI products and establish guidelines for how they are deployed in patient care, according to Dr. Adrian Zai, UMass Chan’s chief research informatics officer and co-leader of the Health AI Assurance Laboratory.
“This collaboration enables a rapid yet rigorous pathway to develop, test and evaluate AI tools using real-world clinical data,” he said in a statement.
UMass Chan will supply data used for AI testing through its Center for Clinical and Translational Science’s Research Informatics Core, of which Zai is also director.
THE LARGER TREND
Last year, UMass Chan and MITRE Corp., which also operates the national AI Assurance and Discovery Lab in northern Virginia, launched the Health AI Assurance Laboratory after receiving a $555,000 Massachusetts Technology & Innovation Ecosystem Awards Program award and a private-sector match.
“Current and future healthcare professionals will be able to create and guide AI technology to fulfill its promise of better, more efficient and more equitable patient care across our communities,” Michael Collins, chancellor of UMass Chan, said in a statement at the time.
Many organizations, including the Department of Health and Human Services, have been working to operationalize health AI by evaluating the quality of machine learning algorithms to understand their benefits and track where clinical innovation is going.
However, in December, some members of Congress asked HHS to back away from its years-long effort to establish government-administered health AI testing labs in partnership with industry.
A lack of AI testing and evaluation could prevent providers from implementing advanced disease and risk-prediction models out of fear that they might magnify care inequities, according to Brigham Hyde, CEO of Atropos Health.
“The burden, I think, that should be on companies like mine and others is to show what the expected action and benefit is,” he told Healthcare IT News during a recent HIMSSCast podcast about the need for AI assurance labs.
ON THE RECORD
“Our shared goal is to quickly identify which AI tools are safe, effective and ready for real-world healthcare challenges, and which are not,” Zai said in a statement.
“UMass Chan doesn’t just talk the talk of serving the underserved,” said Dr. Timothy Ferris, Red Cell’s healthcare practice division president. “They do it day in and day out. And those are the types of people that we want to partner with.”
Andrea Fox is senior editor of Healthcare IT News.
Email: [email protected]
Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS Media publication.
