The Veterans Affairs Department, often hammered for over budget, timeline-busting modernization projects, spent much of 2019 harnessing innovative and cutting-edge technology.
In a recent conversation with Nextgov, Veteran’s Health Administration Innovation Ecosystem Executive Director Dr. Ryan Vega reflected on the fruits of VA’s mission- and digitally-driven innovation that blossomed this year across several domains—and shed light on the agency’s plans to implement new applications of emerging technology in 2020.
“The vision in terms of the ecosystem is really focused on two main concepts: to build the organizational capability and to build the organizational infrastructure,” Vega said. “What I mean by that is the organizational capability to truly be a forward-leaning, progressive, innovative organization requires a workforce that has a skillset to be able to embrace and to guide true change agents, that understands what it means to embrace new disruption and new ideas.”
With insights and experience working at VA medical centers and across the agency, Vega looked back on the agency’s milestones and investments in several areas this year.
Innovation Driven By Artificial Intelligence
Recognizing the need to harness the power of artificial intelligence—especially as VA houses one of the most robust data collections and one of the largest integrated medical records systems in the world—the agency appointed its first-ever director of AI in July. Dr. Gil Alterovitz, a Harvard Medical School professor and member of the Computational Health Informatics Program at Boston Children’s Hospital, was tapped to spearhead VA’s efforts to improve veteran care through AI-enabled solutions. Early in his time in the new role, Alterovitz told Nextgov that his tapping cutting veterans
