VA plans to award AI tech sprint winners contracts for ambient medical transcription services

The Department of Veterans Affairs released a notice of intent to issue sole source contracts for an artificial intelligence-enabled healthcare dictation tool late last week. 

On behalf of the Veterans Health Administration, the VA’s Strategic Acquisition Center announced that it plans to award non-competitive, fixed-price contracts to Abridge AI, Inc. and Nuance Communications, Inc., two AI platform providers for the healthcare industry, according to the notice. The two vendors will conduct cloud-based, ambient scribe pilots that use AI to transcribe clinical encounters and generate notes in medical settings.

The anticipated sole-source awards are the result of the businesses winning the first track of the VA’s AI Tech Sprint, which focused on generating transcriptions from ambient recordings of patient encounters within specialty care, mental health care and primary care settings, according to the agency’s site.

Through the notice, the VA is also soliciting feedback from other parties that believe they could meet the needs of the contracts.

The VA was tasked in President Biden’s October AI executive order with running two tech sprints. In addition to the first track, the agency held a second tech sprint seeking an AI system to process documents generated in patient-provider encounters and other complex medical documents for “increasing continuity of care for veterans” and sharing “key points” with VA providers, the agency said.

The pilot program will integrate with the VA’s electronic health record modernization program and workflows, the notice states. Providers will be able to start recording without the manual entry of a patient’s identifying information, and draft notes can be automatically inserted into the EHR without manually copying and pasting. 

Charles Worthington, the chief AI and technology officer for the VA, said in a recent interview with FedScoop that the agency has a list of high-priority AI use cases that it is “really leaning into,” including the tech sprints. 

“I feel like right now, we’re in that awkward stage where most of these tools are a different window … where there’s a lot of flipping back and forth between tools and figuring out how best to integrate those AI tools with the more traditional systems,” Worthington said in the interview. “I think that’s just kind of a relatively unfigured-out problem. Especially, if you think of a place like VA, where we have a lot of legacy systems, things that have been built over the past number of decades, oftentimes updating those is not the easiest thing.”

In the same interview, Worthington said that the VA’s technical infrastructure was on “pretty good footing” — despite the threat of funding reductions from Congress for fiscal 2025. That potential for forthcoming fiscal challenges comes after the VA has faced trouble on Capitol Hill regarding concerns with modernization upgrades, a lack of AI-related disclosures and inadequate tech contractor sanctions, and consistent scrutiny of the department’s Oracle Cerner-developed EHR, which has just seen a contract extension.