Dive Brief:
- San Francisco-based Flow Health announced a five-year partnership with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs to bring artificial intelligence and precision medicine to veterans.
- Under the agreement, the VA and Flow Health will build a medical knowledge graph to inform decision-making and train AI to personalize care plans.
- The aim is to understand the common elements that make certain people susceptible to particular diseases, pinpoint effective treatments and identify potential side effects in order to improve care decisions.
Dive Insight:
The work will involve integrating large amounts of data and looking for relationships between genomes and phenotypes to understand what different gene variants mean and an individual’s disease risk. The information will enable more precise diagnoses and individualized treatments, Flow Health said.
The resulting knowledge graph will draw from over 30 petabytes of longitudinal clinical data culled from the personal health records of 22 million veterans spanning more than two decades. Patient information will be de-identified during analysis to protect privacy.
Robert Rowley, chief medical officer at Flow Health, called the endeavor a “watershed moment for deep learning in healthcare.”
Vice President Joe Biden has made harnessing big data to advance precision medicine for veterans a priority of his Cancer Moonshot initiative. An October report from the Cancer Moonshot Task Force cites a five-year collaboration between the VA and Department of Energy aimed at detecting and treating cancer, cardiovascular diseases, and mental health issues.