With the HHS Office of the Chief Technology Officer (CTO), Presidential Innovation Fellows (PIF) jointly pioneered the health tech sprint, "TOP Health," that chose 10 teams delivering digital tools — built with open federal data and emerging technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI) — to improve clinical trials, experimental therapies, and data-driven solutions for complex challenges from cancer to Lyme and tick-borne diseases. The teams ranged from two international teams (i.e. Microsoft Healthcare and Philips Research) to one originally at a medical center that officially spun out into a new company specifically based on the AI clinical trial search tool developed during the sprint. It included physicians and patient advocates as well as data stewards and experts in the relevant domain areas from within government.

The project drew on resources across over a dozen federal agencies and departments. This project represents one of the first instances of a new program that led to new open federal data via machine readable information as defined per the newly signed "OPEN Government Data Act" under the "Foundations for Evidence-based Policymaking Act" (signed Jan 15, 2019). A final demo day will take place on March 1 with cross-agency leadership.

For more information on:

Sprint results:

https://www.hhs.gov/cto/blog/2019/1/17/top-health-tech-sprint-unleashes-the-power-of-open-data-and-ai.html

Sprint participants:

https://digital.gov/2018/11/02/health-tech-sprint-aims-at-improving-care-access-experience

• AI Ecosystem

  Contact: Gil Alterovitz

  Novel therapeutics, such as those under development in clinical trials, are often a treatment option for those patients with serious and life threatening diseases such as cancer. Increasing patient awareness of clinical trials is believed to be a factor in reducing time for participant recruitment, a very large cost categories in clinical trials. Thus, applying AI to help patients find clinical trials studying novel therapeutics, may have the potential to improve patient care and, by aiding in recruitment, reduce drug development costs.

• Lyme Disease

  Contact: Kristin Honey

  Lyme disease is a tick-borne bacterial infection that affects more than 300,000 patients annually in the United States-more Americans than HIV/AIDS and breast cancer combined. There is no vaccine and an estimated 10-20% of treated Lyme disease patients fail to recover fully.This work will harness the power of collaboration, citizen science, and data for Lyme disease. The goal is to create digital tools and data sharing capabilities for the prevention, education, and science that will support data-driven decisions and improve public health related to tick-borne disease