Veteran Affairs Empowers Staff With AI to Better Assist Veterans

The U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs (VA) is adopting a more “cautious” approach to using AI for veteran-facing applications. The agency is focusing on utilizing AI internally to enhance the capabilities of employees who assist veterans, according to VA OCTO Data and AI Health Product Lead Kaeli Yuen.

“We’re being more cautious on the directly veteran-facing applications of AI. The way that we are impacting veterans with AI at this point is by empowering the employees that are answering their questions. We don’t have, to my knowledge, direct generative AI chatbots directly talking to veterans or anything like that. We’re moving much more cautiously there until we can understand the risks better,” Yuen said during Washington Technology and Nextgov/FCW’s 2024 Federal Health Summit.

The VA has been leveraging AI for use case such as risk prediction for suicide, however, now with generative AI, a lot more can be done, according to Yuen.

“Now with generative AI being in the place where it is, a lot more doors have opened – largely in the realm of administrative burdens, clinical documentation burdens, and so forth.VA is now focusing on things like AI scribes, processing of community care documents from outside hospitals, and things like that that take up a lot of clinicians’ time and are not directly related to patient care,” she added.

Earlier this year, the VA identified more than 100 AI use cases and around 40 of these use cases are currently in an operational phase and are actively being deployed in the field, VA Chief Technology Officer Charles Worthington, revealed.

Among the AI use cases listed by the VA is a Machine Learning-Based Application for informed clinical decision-making. According to the VA, changes in microbiome data from pre-diabetic patients over 4 months will be used in PredictMod software to show response to ketogenic diet intervention.