VA Employees Save 6 Hours a Week With AI Tools | HealthCast

So the last time we talked was a couple of years ago at HIMSS 2024.

And you highlighted four areas that you're focusing on in VA's AI strategy, and that's governance, use cases, infrastructure, and workforce.

So over the past two years, has your approach to VA's AI strategy changed at all? And what progress have you made since then?

Yeah, I think two big things.

One, the technology has just moved so quickly.

So what we're capable of doing today is just dramatically more than even two years ago.

And then two is just the progress in all of those areas.

So since then, we've implemented really strong AI governance and oversight to ensure that any AI we ever release at VA has that right oversight, trust, reliability.

And then we released a bunch of incredibly useful AI into VA.

So we have systems in our clinical decision support space that are helping us identify veterans who might be at risk for opioid overdose events.

Implementation of a system like that is associated with a 22% decrease in mortality.

So we've been seeing a lot of really impactful and exciting outcomes like that since that time.

And so that's been really exciting to see.

That is super exciting.

So those are some cool projects.

What are your next steps with those projects? Or when you're looking at where you could integrate AI at VA, are there any areas that you're targeting?

Yeah, I think one of the big things that's changed in the past few years is how capable just general purpose tooling is.

So we have really invested in accessibility for our workforce of general purpose tools.

And we've seen employees use that for everything from Making more personalized medicine, more personalized handouts for low literacy veterans, giving time back to claims processors who are able to spend more time thinking through the details of their job as opposed to doing the paperwork.

And so the more we can provide these generally useful tools across our workforce, we found to be really helpful.

We ran a survey on it.

And folks told us they were saving six hours per week.

And 80% said they were improving their job satisfaction.

80% also said that they had more time to get back to veterans and direct veteran care.

So there's a few technologies we've seen where our employees really want it and are investing in it.