Last spring the startup Flow Health began a five-year contract with the Department of Veteran Affairs to examine all historic and ongoing medical records. The startup will use information obtained from those records to train artificial intelligence to, among other things, fight illness and predict disease for the more than eight million people cared for by the Department of Veteran Affairs. Advice and predictions from Flow Health will be presented to health care professionals through Vista, the DoD's open source system for electronic medical records. Doctors can then choose to apply or ignore the advice drawn from the VA's vast storage of medical records. "When a veteran comes in and presents certain clinical symptoms, we can better understand and make predictions about'What is the likely diagnosis? What is the best diagnostic test? What's the best care pathway?' and so forth," CEO Alex Meshkin told VentureBeat in a Skype interview.

The US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) has signed a five-year deal with Flow Health, an AI company, to develop personalized healthcare plans for veterans using deep learning. Deep learning is a tool in machine learning that is useful for sifting through huge heaps of data to find useful information. Flow Health is focusing on building a knowledge graph, a database containing information about people's genomes and phenotypes, to identify disease risks and recommend treatments. "Our mission is to advance healthcare by applying the latest artificial intelligence techniques to improve the detection, diagnosis, treatment and management of diseases," said Alex Meshkin, CEO of Flow Health. "The VA supports millions of Americans who have served our nation and deserve our honor, respect and the best care our country has to offer. Through our partnership with the VA, Flow Health is working to unleash the power of AI to benefit our nation's veterans."

The Department of Veterans Affairs will work with Flow Health to build a medical knowledge graph to inform decision-making and train artificial intelligence to personalize care plans. The objective of the 5-year partnership, Flow Health executives said in a statement, is to understand the common elements that make certain people susceptible to particular diseases, to pinpoint effective treatments and identify possible side effects in order to inform care decisions. VA and Flow Health's work will entail integrating large volumes of data in the quest to discover relationships between genomes and phenotypes.The goal is to learn what every gene variant means, to identify disease risk, to make more precise diagnoses and to suggest individualized treatments. "Our mission is to advance healthcare by applying the latest artificial intelligence techniques to improve the detection, diagnosis, treatment and management of diseases," Flow Health CEO Alex Meshkin said in a statement. Flow Health is building a knowledge graph of medicine and genomics comprising more than 30 petabytes of longitudinal clinical data drawn from VA records on 22 million veterans spanning more than 20 years.