Leidos, a $3 billion government health care technology contractor, sees potential use cases for artificial intelligence for its clients, including the Veterans Health Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration. Liz Porter is president of the health group at Leidos, which works with every federal agency focused on health. Ben caught up with the former Lockheed Martin executive at the firm’s Reston, Va., headquarters and discussed how the company approaches AI, interoperability and more. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. What do you see as the strongest use cases for AI? We've been doing a lot with natural language processing for a long time. I’m a military spouse, and we carried paper records everywhere. When you scan that in, you’re able to use natural language processing to look for information to help index. It’s been applied in the health space not as broadly as it could be. We’ve been working on large language models to augment what humans are doing. Where does it fit into care delivery? These models and AI can really assist in helping a provider get quicker access to data — being able to leverage that AI capability to pull that data together and bring the salient information. People get nervous when they think about a machine making a determination on your health. But bringing relevant information to the doctor is a great application to help augment what the doctor can do without creating a concern that the machine’s telling you what’s wrong with you. How should AI in health care be regulated? We do have to think about ensuring that whatever is being applied doesn’t have bias. But then you have the other side of it: There’s concern about misinformation happening because of the way AI is trained. How can government facilitate interoperability? The government has focused on developing standards to encourage interoperability. At the end of the day, it is usually not about the technology. It's about the trust factor of data sharing. It will come down to the general public saying, “Wait a minute, this is my information and I should have an easier time getting it.” Coming into this industry from defense, intelligence and civil, health is probably the furthest behind in that technology evolution.
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