Digital Health and AI Action Collaborative
Promote digital tools and architecture innovation for seamless connectivity and learning, including accelerating the responsible development and application of AI and other emerging technologies for transformed health, health care, and biomedical science.

About the Digital Health and AI Action Collaborative
As one of four action collaboratives under the National Academy of Medicine’s Leadership Consortium, the Digital Health and AI Action Collaborative (DHAC) works to advance the digital infrastructure necessary for continuous improvement and innovation in health, health care, and evidence development.
While health technology emerges and improves at a rapid pace, strategic and equitable integration of new technology into the health system lags behind. The DHAC focuses on identifying, promoting, and encouraging interoperability of new technologies; guiding their entry into the health system as fully integrated digital platforms and tools for optimal health system performance; and promoting strategic sharing, linkage, and use of data produced or captured by these new technologies.
Co-Chairs

Peter Lee is President, Microsoft Research, at Microsoft. He leads Microsoft Research across its nine laboratories around the world. He also oversees several incubation teams for new research-powered lines of business, the largest of which today is Microsoft’s growing healthcare and life sciences effort. Dr. Lee has extensive experience in managing fundamental research to commercial impact in a range of areas, spanning artificial intelligence, to quantum computing, to biotechnology, and more. Before joining Microsoft in 2010, he was at DARPA, where he established a new technology office that created operational capabilities in machine learning, data science, and computational social science. From 1987 to 2005 he was a Professor at Carnegie Mellon University, and from 2005 to 2008 the Head of the university’s computer science department. Today, in addition to his management responsibilities, Dr. Lee speaks and writes widely on technology trends and policies. He is a member of the National Academy of Medicine. He serves on the Boards of Directors of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, the Brotman Baty Institute for Precision Medicine, and the Kaiser Permanente Bernard J. Tyson School of Medicine. In public service, Dr. Lee was a commissioner on President Obama’s Commission on Enhancing National Cybersecurity and led several studies for both PCAST and the National Academies on the impact of federal research investments on economic growth. He has testified before both the US House Science and Technology Committee and the US Senate Commerce Committee.

Kenneth D. Mandl, MD, MPH is a Professor at Harvard Medical School (HMS) and the Director at Boston Children’s Hospital Computational Health Informatics Program. Recognized for research and teaching, Mandl received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers and the Clifford A. Barger Award for top mentors at Harvard Medical School. He was advisor to two Directors of the CDC and chairs the Board of Scientific Counselors of the NIH’s National Library of Medicine. Dr. Mandl has been elected to multiple honor societies including the American Society for Clinical Investigation, Society for Pediatric Research, American College of Medical Informatics and American Pediatric Society. Mandl leads two postdoctoral training programs in clinical and informatics research and directs the Population Health Track of the new Masters Degree in Biomedical Informatics at HMS. Mandl is a faculty member in the HMS Center for Biomedical Informatics and in the Division of Health Sciences and Technology at Harvard and MIT. Through scholarship intersecting epidemiology and informatics, Mandl pioneered use of IT and big data for population health, discovery, patient engagement and care redesign. Mandl leads the transformative SMART Platforms initiative to design the “app store for health” and is principal investigator of the Scalable Collaborative Infrastructure for a Learning Health System across Boston hospitals and nationally. Recognized for research and teaching, Mandl received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers and the Clifford A. Barger Award for top mentors at Harvard Medical School. He was advisor to two Directors of the CDC and chairs the Board of Scientific Counselors of the NIH’s National Library of Medicine. His clinical training and experience is in pediatrics and pediatric emergency medicine. Dr. Mandl has been elected to multiple honor societies including the American Society for Clinical Investigation, Society for Pediatric Research, American College of Medical Informatics and American Pediatric Society.
Impact
Under the guidance of the Leadership Consortium, the DHAC takes the lead on positioning digital health infrastructure as a core utility for the common good.
Action Collaborative Description
A seamless digital infrastructure for the protected capture, sharing, analysis, and use of health data and information is required for health system effectiveness, efficiency, equity and continuous learning and improvement. The NAM Digital Health Action Collaborative was established in 2008 for public and private organizations to work together in a trusted neutral venue on cooperative projects of priority to the common good. These projects range from technical reviews and public discussions of key issues to targeted analytics, modeling, and incubating the launch of new capacities. Examples of the issues engaged include artificial intelligence and machine learning, data ownership and control, and standardized multi-level core indicators.
Stakeholders
- Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality
- Alliance for AI in Healthcare
- Amazon
- American Medical Informatics Association
- Apple
- Assistant Secretary for Technology Policy
- Association of American Medical Colleges
- AstraZenaca
- Atrium Health
- Blue Cross Blue Shield
- CVS Health
- Center for Medicare & Medicaid Innovation
- Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services
- Cerner
- Digital Medicine Society
- Duke University
- Epic
- Families USA
- Food and Drug Administration
- HIMSS
- Harvard University
- Intel
- Kaiser Permanente
- Komodo Health
- MITRE
- Mayo Clinic
- Microsoft
- National Institutes of Health
- New York University
- Northwestern University
- OCHIN
- Office of Science and Technology Policy
- Philips
- Samsung
- U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs
- UnitedHealth Group
- University of California San Francisco
- Vanderbilt University
- Walmart
- Yale University
Activities
- Projects completed, under way, or under consideration by the DHAC include:
Health Care Artificial Intelligence Code of Conduct: An initiative aimed at providing a guiding framework to ensure that AI algorithms and their application in health, health care, and biomedical science perform accurately, safely, reliably, and ethically in the service of better health for all. - Health Professions Forum on AI in Health and Medicine: A forum bringing together health professional leadership, technology developers, and forward-thinking health system leaders to engage in discussions surrounding the transformative landscape of large language models and generative AI in health and medicine within the context of a learning health system.
- Generative AI in Health, Health Care, and Health Research: A two-day multi- stakeholder workshop in fall 2023 exploring the potential near- and medium-term applications of Generative AI approaches in multiple activities of the health system.
Recent Meetings
In-person attendance at meetings is by invitation only due to room capacity limitations.
- October 30, 2024
- May 14, 2024
- October 25 – October 26, 2023
- August 18, 2021
- April 22, 2021
- February 20, 2020
- May 22, 2019
- January 16, 2019
- June 28, 2018
- January 30, 2018
- November 30, 2017
- July 13, 2017
- December 1, 2016
- February 18, 2016
- December 3, 2013
- April 16, 2013
- August 23, 2012
- August 18, 2011

Featured Activity
Health Care Artificial Intelligence Code of Conduct
The NAM Leadership Consortium’s new initiative aims to align & facilitate adoption of an AI Code of Conduct for health, medical care, and health research. Learn more about this multi-phased project to ensure responsible & equitable use of AI in health care.
Publications
Contact Information
Questions?
For more information, please contact [email protected].