Harvard Medical School Professor Gil Alterovitz Named VA’s First AI Director

Gil Alterovitz, a biomedical informatics professor at Harvard Medical School and a White House presidential innovation fellow, has joined the Department of Veterans Affairs as director of artificial intelligence. He leads the ongoing efforts to broaden the application of AI in department’s research and healthcare programs and collaborate with third-party organizations focusing on the technology, VA said Wednesday.

“We’re working with a few organizations that can test out small amounts of data in the VA format,” Alterovitz said. “Then they can build the AI tools and develop a program that can then be used on a larger data set.”

Previously, he served as a member of the Obama Administration’s Precision Medicine Task Force and co-chairman of HL7 International’s clinical genomics workgroup. Alterovitz is also a professor under the Computational Health Informatics Program at Boston Children’s Hospital.