The US Department of Veteran Affairs is using Artificial Intelligence to supercharge its healthcare services

By Lulu Chang Published December 13, 2016

The veteran health care system has seen its fair share of criticism over the last several years, but a new tech-forward partnership may help officials grant returning warriors the care they need. On Tuesday, Flow Health announced the formation of a five-year partnership with the United States Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) for the purposes of building a “medical knowledge graph with deep learning to inform medical decision-making and train artificial intelligence to personalize care plans.”

The goal of the new collaboration will be to better understand the common problems that may put individuals at risk to certain diseases, thereby helping to identify effective treatments as well as possible side effects. The ambitious undertaking will involve “large volumes of data,” Flow Health said, and will also require the extensive study of gene variants in order “to identify disease risk, to make more precise diagnoses, and to suggest individualized treatments.”

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“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.”

Ultimately, this partnership will result in the world’s most extensive knowledge graph of medicine and genomics based on VA records comprised of 22 million veterans over the course of the last two decades.

“Developing artificial intelligence which can automatically identify the best diagnostic and treatment pathways will assist clinicians in delivering precision medicine to every veteran,” said Dr. Robert Rowley, chief medical officer at Flow Health. “To build artificial intelligence you need huge amounts of data to feed deep learning models. This is why this partnership between the VA and Flow Health is a watershed moment for deep learning in health care.”

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