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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

President, Microsoft Research
Microsoft Corporation

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.

Harvard University

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.

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.