A community of nearly 3000 organizations and growing. But who is CHAI?

By Brian Anderson, CEO

The Coalition for Health AI (CHAI) was started by a group of clinicians and data scientists in the spring of 2022. Inspired by the potential of AI to advance the practice of medicine, clinicians, health systems, experts, and stakeholders across health and technology ecosystems saw the need for a trusted source on Responsible AI in Health that serves all.

This year has been pivotal for CHAI in our journey to help enable trusted, independent assurance of AI solutions with local monitoring and validation. In late 2023, we published our first paper on the concept of an independent network of assurance labs and have since built out those ideas in our various professional domains experimenting and sharing results. Our CHAI workgroups have used those insights to inform consensus frameworks and provide the basis for assurance and validation systems.  

We established CHAI as a non-profit organization beginning with an extraordinary group as our inaugural board of directors, founding members and advisory boards. They represent increasingly diverse perspectives within the CHAI community which is now comprised of nearly 3,000 organizations and hundreds of individual experts and stakeholders engaged in workgroups.

This weekend, we will host our first CHAI Global Summit at HLTH 2024. We will formally incorporate comments into our Responsible Health AI Framework.  We will introduce CHAI model card frameworks – our approach to health AI “nutrition labels” – that will inform consumers, provide safety, and give innovators clear pathways for complex AI products and services. We will also provide updates from our predictive AI, generative AI, and other workgroups. And at HLTH 2024 we will network with attendees and encourage them to join and participate in CHAI.

In the meantime, I want to provide an update on who we are becoming as a community. While new members join CHAI each week from across the health ecosystem, we already reflect a broad diversity of perspectives. Who is CHAI? 

  • Health Systems: We have more than 200 health system members in our community, from MedStar Health in the mid-Atlantic region to Mercy in Missouri, Arkansas, Kansas, and Oklahoma to Providence in the Pacific Northwest to academic medical centers including Duke Health, Mayo Clinic, and Stanford Medicine. 
  • Professional Advocacy and Specialty Groups: Core to our work is building on foundational knowledge and standards that ensure quality in health care. Organizations like the American Society of Clinical Oncology, College of American Pathologists, National Council for Mental Wellbeing, HL7, the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation, and The SCAN Foundation are among more than 100 philanthropic, professional advocacy, medical specialty, and standards organizations that have joined the CHAI community.
  • Healthcare Industry: We’re thankful to have membership from leaders in the health industry from CVS and UnitedHealth Group to OCHIN and Solventum.
  • Startups: Nearly half of our membership are startups, who are creating solutions used across the healthcare industry. They include Abridge, Ambience Healthcare, Affineon, Bend Health, Innovaccer, and Suki.
  • Tech Infrastructure Providers We are grateful for the broad participation of the AI frontier model and infrastructure providers, most recently OpenAI. 

We will continue to be transparent in our communications with our members and the broader community. Our plans include detailed summaries of workgroup sessions for CHAI members, framework drafts for public comment, basic health AI education for policy makers, and stories about the work of our members, partners, and other important voices in Responsible Health AI.

I hope to see many of you at HLTH. Please reach out to me and the CHAI Team if you have questions about getting involved.

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