Harnessing AI for Good: KHI Guides Health Departments Toward Responsible and Effective AI Use
Success StoriesArtificial Intelligence (AI) is impacting every field, including public health. As AI tools reshape how health departments operate, establishing clear rules of the road is essential to ensure these tools are truly used in ways that benefit the people they serve – and that’s where the Kansas Health Institute and its partners are stepping in to help. In their role as a Public Health Infrastructure Grant (PHIG) technical assistance hub, KHI has helped more than 5,000 public health professionals build AI literacy and confidence. By hosting over 40 workshops and developing an AI policy toolkit, KHI is helping health departments learn how to navigate the AI landscape.
In this video, Tatiana Lin, KHI’s Director of Business Strategy and Innovation, explains how KHI is helping health departments use AI responsibly and prepare for the future of public health. Used thoughtfully, AI tools can enhance, not replace, the critical judgment and expertise of public health professionals by allowing organizations to do more with their existing resources. From improving public health communications to enhancing predictive modeling and disease surveillance to streamlining administrative operations, AI can help organizations build capacity and increase efficiency.
However, AI is not a one-size-fits-all solution. As with any powerful technology, its value lies not only in what it can do, but in the intentions and context behind how it is used. KHI is working side-by-side with health departments and technology experts to help public health agencies harness AI to better serve their communities. Learn more about KHI’s AI resources on their website.
Video Transcript
This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
How are you helping health departments navigate A.I.?
When KHI started getting to know about OpenAI and artificial intelligence, coming as “a whole hype,” we started wondering: where is public health? How can this particular technology support public health?
And it’s been relatively new: about three years ago, we started talking about it, but it seemed like, looking around, we didn’t identify any particular efforts going on in developing a resource for public health organizations, how they can tackle it, how they can make sense out of it.
Our team decided that it could be really valuable to have, under the Public Health Infrastructure Grant, some kind of consistent and comprehensive guidance that the grantees can use to develop their AI policies and develop AI guidelines so they can safely experiment with AI technologies for their work.
How are you developing AI capacity in public health?
In the development of a toolkit itself, we started with learning a lot about what other policies existed at the state level, what the literature says about best practices on developing AI policies, but most importantly, it was really hearing from PHIG grantees about what their needs are and how this policy should interact with other policies in their departments. So, actually, the Public Health Infrastructure Grant allowed us to do the workshops to build capacity and literacy on AI. Through those workshops, we were able to gather information that ultimately also informed the actual production of the toolkit.
We were able to make sure that the content of the toolkit is reflective of the needs. For example, the toolkit has guidance on how to build a rationale around the use of AI. We don’t want to just jump to AI, we want to have a solid reason why we’re using that technology and not something else.
What has the impact been?
The Public Health Infrastructure Grant has been instrumental in helping us work with partners, specifically with Wichita State University Community Engagement Institute and the Health Resources in Action team, to build the capacity of PHIG grantees in AI. Over that period of time, we conducted over 40 workshops that reached more than 5,000 people. That is a tremendous success in being able to work directly with the PHIG community to build their capacity and comfort with using AI in an ethical way.
Why is this work so important?
Artificial intelligence can be very powerful. It can help with predictive analytics, it can help analyze massive data sets much quicker, so public health can respond more quickly to emerging needs. By grasping how to do it best, we can help public health be very powerful. But in order to do that, we need public-private partnerships. We need public health to connect with the private sector, and the private sector to work with public health. We also need to figure out how to incorporate AI into data modernization efforts more effectively. We need to figure out how we can support departments in their capacity building, having use cases, and knowledge sharing.
One thing we have learned from the workshops is that there is some innovation happening in different places, but we don’t necessarily all know what that looks like. For example, we heard some departments using PocketTalk, which is an AI tool that helps with translation in multiple languages. It will be good to capture those use cases and share them with other departments as lessons learned and how it can be implemented.
It’s important to realize that AI seems here to stay. We’ve seen tools that are consistently embedding AI, even tools that didn’t have AI before. So I think it’s important to remember that if we’re not using AI, it doesn’t mean it’s going to go away. It’s here, and we need to figure out how to leverage it in a way that can really support the work we’re doing in public health.
The great news is that the Public Health Infrastructure Grant has the capacity, the experts, and has that as a part of the work that they’re doing to really support grantees.