US public health agencies to test OpenAI and Anthropic tools

The Coalition for Health AI (CHAI) will run trials in 10 state, local, tribal and territorial public health jurisdictions that will test generative AI products from OpenAI and Anthropic. The initiative, called the Public Health Use Case and Learning Scaling Engine (PULSE), will use donated enterprise licenses and Accenture will manage participant onboarding and help produce implementation playbooks.

OpenAI and Anthropic have each provided enterprise licenses that together will cover up to 2,000 public health practitioners during the pilots. CHAI’s leadership council will select the participating jurisdictions and assign practitioners across the sites. The pilots aim to yield operational guidance that other public health agencies can use.

CHAI identified five specific use cases for the pilots: biosurveillance and drug-wave prediction; mapping social determinants of health; operations, efficiency and community-feedback analysis; public communications and a multilingual translation hub; and automated clinical-data retrieval using a FHIR query engine. FHIR is a standard for exchanging electronic health information between compatible systems.

The announcement leaves several technical and governance details unspecified. CHAI has not named which vendor products, model versions or configurations will be used, nor explained how providers will be allocated across pilots. The coalition has not published evaluation criteria, privacy and security requirements, human-review rules, data-retention periods, access controls or audit arrangements for the trials. It also did not specify whether pilot workflows will use identifiable records, de-identified data, synthetic datasets or aggregated information, or whether staff must verify model outputs before acting on them.

Application of U.S. HIPAA protections will depend on each participating organization, the data involved and the function performed; HIPAA will not apply uniformly across all pilots. OpenAI and Anthropic state that inputs and outputs from their commercial services are not used to train their models by default. CHAI has not specified how those provider settings will be configured for the pilots or whether additional safeguards will be put in place.

PULSE is scheduled to begin in autumn 2026, and CHAI expects to publish playbooks summarizing lessons from the 10 jurisdictions in 2027. The coalition has not detailed how the playbooks will address differences in agency size, technical systems, legal responsibilities, staffing or procurement rules, nor has it set minimum staffing, infrastructure, interoperability or cybersecurity requirements for participation.

Dr. David Lakey, a former Texas health commissioner, described the programme as focused on trust, governance and execution, and said PULSE is designed for practical implementation. Felipe Millon, OpenAI’s head of government go-to-market, described the licenses as a way for organizations to evaluate tools through a structured process. Elizabeth Kelly, Anthropic’s head of beneficial deployments, said PULSE will let practitioners test tools in their own environments with privacy, governance and responsible-use measures incorporated. CHAI chief executive Dr. Brian Anderson framed the programme as an opportunity to give public health agencies hands-on experience after years of limited technology investment, and Dr. Ashish Jha, former White House COVID-19 response coordinator, said the pilots will test which applications work and document findings for other agencies.

PULSE is part of CHAI’s broader work on governance standards for healthcare AI. The coalition has published playbooks on organizational AI policies and governance structures and is developing additional guidance with industry participants. CHAI has collaborated with the Joint Commission on governance playbooks tied to a voluntary Responsible Use of AI in Healthcare certification; the PULSE announcement did not indicate that participants must pursue that certification.

CHAI cited National Association of County and City Health Officials data showing nearly 40% of local health departments were not using AI. The coalition said some departments are interested in revising workflows and improving efficiency. PULSE will provide licenses, onboarding, peer communities and implementation playbooks; the pilots will determine how those resources perform in real public health environments.