Health systems are learning that AI costs don’t end at deployment.
Mayo Clinic’s chief AI implementation officer told Becker’s in August that the cost of maintaining AI systems has been “far higher” than expected. For some of the most experimental projects, federal agencies and philanthropists are covering the cost of building and testing the technology.
Several of the awards below come through the same Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health program.
Here are seven AI projects backed by outside funding, as reported by Becker’s:
- Columbia, Md.-based MedStar Health Research Institute and Indianapolis-based Regenstrief Institute were awarded a combined $1.5 million by HHS’ Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT for projects focused on agentic AI in clinical care and laboratory interoperability. MedStar is developing the Sovereign Execution Bridge, an open-source framework designed to give patients control over AI agents that coordinate complex clinical follow-ups and to keep verifiable records of the agents’ actions. The awards were announced Oct. 6 through ONC’s Leading Edge Acceleration Projects in Health IT program.
- UC San Diego Health is working with Boston-based Harvard Medical School and Anthropic to develop an open-source oversight system that checks the safety of medical recommendations made by patient-facing AI. The project is part of the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health’s Agentic AI-Enabled Cardiovascular Care Transformation, or ADVOCATE, program, which focuses on AI-supported care for patients with heart failure. The team’s approach centers on a “clinical constitution,” a set of rules it plans to develop with communities and stakeholders. Teams in the program must meet milestones every three months to remain in it.
- Stanford (Calif.) Medicine researchers are receiving up to $14.9 million from ARPA-H to build STEWARD, short for safety, trust, evaluation and watchdog for embedded agentic care delivery. The three-stage supervisory system will monitor autonomous AI agents used in cardiovascular care and give on-site reports to care teams. The award is part of the four-year, $62.7 million ADVOCATE program, and partners include OpenAI, the University of Washington in Seattle and Tuple Health.
- In a separate ARPA-H award, a Stanford Medicine team led by Purvesh Khatri, PhD, received up to $41.4 million to develop an AI-based digital twin of patients’ immune responses to predict outcomes in the ICU.
- ARPA-H awarded contracts Sept. 9 to six teams under ADVOCATE, which aims to build the first FDA-authorized agentic AI system for cardiovascular care. Oakland, Calif.-based Kaiser Permanente and Durham, N.C.-based Duke University are leading real-world implementation. Kaiser will deploy across 21 medical centers and more than 260 clinics on Epic, and Duke will test across five health systems and rural sites on Epic and Oracle Health EHRs. The program funds up to $33.7 million in its first year, and the lead patient-facing developer must submit an FDA authorization package within 24 months.
- Children’s Nebraska in Omaha is using a $5.5 million grant from the James M. Cox Foundation to develop virtual reality therapy pathways augmented with AI for pediatric behavioral healthcare. The pathways are designed to help young patients practice emotional regulation and coping skills while AI shapes the therapeutic environment in real time based on their responses.
- Nvidia investor and board member Tench Coxe and his wife, Simone, gave a $100 million unrestricted gift Jan. 12 to support UT Health Austin’s (Texas) goal of building an “AI-native” academic medical center. The $2.5 billion University of Texas at Austin Medical Center is expected to treat its first patients by 2030.
