The first annual Brain Health & Rehabilitation Through Artificial Intelligence Network (BRAIN) Summit, hosted by the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) National Artificial Intelligence Institute (NAII), was held on September 7 – 9, 2022. The VA NAII BRAIN Summit was the premier event for leaders and innovators interested in exploring the nexus of artificial intelligence (AI) policy, health care and brain health for our nation’s Veterans, to highlight leveraging AI to explore new frontiers in brain health for our nation’s Veterans. Participants from government, industry and research institutions shared research findings on AI applications and hosted thoughtful discussions on the potential for AI and technology-based solutions to impact current practices and policies.
Apex’s Bob Calco, Chief Architect & Co-Founder, had the honor of speaking at the event, participating in two panel discussions and presenting a more in depth discussion on using blockchain technology for true data interoperability.
Panel Discussion: AI Tech Sprints
In this session, Bob shares highlights about Apex’s success as a participant in the VA NAII 2021 AI Tech Sprint, in which Apex was a Top 10 Finalist and First Place Winner in the Administrative/Interoperability Cohort. This effort also won a 2022 FedHealthIT Innovation Award. Bob provides a quick overview of our Provider Directory Use Case that led to the award of a 12-month pilot contract with the VA.
Panel Discussion: Blockchain in Healthcare
In this session, Bob examines whether a “distributed ledger” is the only (much less the best) metaphor for sharing clinical data using blockchain technologies and explores alternative implementation strategies that are more aligned with the healthcare industry’s data interoperability requirements and data sharing challenges.
Session: Beyond Data Federation: A 21st Century Vision for Real-Time Data Interoperability
In this session, Bob describes Apex’s novel approach to conceiving a world of real-time data interoperability that overcomes all of the technical, practical, and even political obstacles that are all-too-familiar to practitioners in the space. It means thinking differently about both legacy application modernization and interoperability at a primary metaphor level. Rather than thinking of it in an anthropomorphic sense as “systems talking to each other,” an architectural strategy that insists systems know nothing about each other, but rather an architectural strategy of exchanging data indirectly through a blockchain-powered, adapter-based change propagation mechanism. You will find that even here we think beyond the “ledger” metaphor of blockchain. In this tutorial you will learn about a non-ledger-based approach to use blockchain for facilitating data interoperability that overcomes the challenges experienced to date.
