HHS Turns to AI for COVID-19 Research

At the National Heart Lung and Blood Institute (NHLBI), CIO Alastair Thomson says machine learning (ML) played a major role in COVID-related research. The National COVID Cohort Collaborative (NC3) clearly demonstrates the value of securely bringing together data in one place, where it can be analyzed by thousands of researchers. Through collaboration with various healthcare and cloud service providers, the NC3 and ML helped NIH identify potential participants for the RECOVER initiative. "The utility of this really became clear when NIH launched the RECOVER initiative, which is dealing with post-acute COVID syndrome, or long COVID," Thomson said at the annual AFCEA's Health IT Summit last week. "They were able to use machine learning with that data to identify the key characteristics, what we call a phenotype, for long COVID."