As applications for artificial intelligence continue to refine and expand, leaders across industries are transforming their organizations by developing use cases for new features and processes.
According to a 2024 Honeywell report, more than 90% of industrial AI leaders are discovering new use cases for AI during implementation, and more than 50% report that their C-suite has already decided to expand AI use at their organizations.
Amid this sustained enthusiasm for AI, the NVIDIA AI Summit in downtown Washington, D.C., brought together experts in robotics, the public sector and more to discuss the current state of AI with an eye toward emerging possibilities.
Tuesday, attendees interested in the U.S. government’s approach to healthcare innovation heard from Renee Wegrzyn, director of ARPA-H, or Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health. She spoke about how ARPA-H got its start, its focus areas and the role of public-private partnerships along with Rory Kelleher, global business development lead for healthcare and life sciences at NVIDIA.
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What Is ARPA-H and What Role Does It Play in Healthcare Innovation?
The launching of Sputnik by the Soviet Union in 1957 caught the U.S. by surprise, and it led to the establishment of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to position the U.S. to have a more proactive posture regarding technological advances.
Similarly, the Biden administration established ARPA-H in 2022 to lead breakthroughs in the healthcare space with the aim of “accelerating better health outcomes” for everyone, Wegrzyn said. ARPA-H brings on program managers for limited terms to tackle key issues in health, such as specific chronic illnesses.
“ARPA-H lives in the future, and so do we at NVIDIA,” Kelleher said as he introduced the agency during the session. “We are in the business of time machines, trying to help make what’s impossible possible.”
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The new federal agency has four focus areas: health science futures, scalable solutions, proactive health and resilient systems.
So, how do AI and accelerating computation push these programs forward? “We’re a really great agency to pilot and test things out,” Wegrzyn said. In one program targeting the expansion of advanced healthcare for rural communities, she mentioned the potential of “AI-assisted task guidance” that can support rural healthcare workers who may lack certain medical skills by coaching them on high-level care and upskilling them.
ARPA-H has issued an open call for the PRECISE-AI program, which hopes to address the issue of AI tools becoming less reliable once updated data is added. “Once these tools are fielded, how do you maintain their performance? How do you learn as you experience that real-world data and make sure that these are tools that can last long into the future?” Wegrzyn asked.
Unlike DARPA, which has the backing of the Department of Defense to further investments, ARPA-H relies on fostering “good relationships with the investor community and with the commercial sector to help take on the investments to the next advanced development stage,” Wegrzyn added, which is why the agency launched its Investor Catalyst Hub.
Data privacy and security are also key considerations as the agency explores AI-driven use cases. It has several cybersecurity-focused programs, such as UPGRADE (or Universal Patching and Remediation for Autonomous Defense), that aim to improve industry standards and capabilities.
