NIH Pursues Next-Gen Electronic Health Record for Empowering AI Tools

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) Clinical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, is mulling updating the 20-year-old legacy Electronic Health Record (EHR), according to media reports.

Jon McKeeby, Chief Information Officer at the NIH Clinical Center, believes the EHR system has become too difficult to maintain.

“This is a level of fragility and complexity. It was based on best-of-breed 20 years ago. That was the way to do an EHR. And it’s made it very complex and very dependent on specific people, specific skills, so it’s very difficult to maintain,” McKeeby said while participating in a panel discussion at AFCEA Bethesda’s Health IT Summit.

For the new EHR, the institute is seeking investments of around US$150-200 million in the next six months. At the same time, the institute is also hoping the EHR could help accelerate its use of artificial intelligence tools.

McKeeby further mentioned that NIH is presently collaborating with the MITRE Corporation to formulate the specifications and performance work statement. The document is expected to lay the groundwork for a future request for proposals. As part of this process, NIH has already identified a minimum of 1,000 requirements for its upcoming EHR.

Last year, NIH granted US$ 1.7 million to Cornell University for the Artificial Intelligence and Precision Nutrition Training Program (AIPrN) which was designed to unite experts from Cornell across various disciplines such as nutrition, medicine, biomedical sciences, computer and information science, and engineering and train them on AI/ML tools.