Public health departments across the United States are preparing to test generative AI tools under a new program called PULSE — the Public Health Use Case and Learning Scaling Engine — launched by the Coalition for Health AI (CHAI) in partnership with OpenAI, Anthropic, and Accenture.
The program will support trials in 10 state, local, tribal, or territorial jurisdictions, giving public health practitioners access to enterprise-grade AI tools from OpenAI and Anthropic. Both companies have donated 10 enterprise licenses each, with capacity for up to 2,000 practitioners.
PULSE focuses on five key use cases:
- Biosurveillance and drug-wave prediction — tracking disease outbreaks and detecting emerging drug threats - Social determinants of health (SDoH) mapping — identifying community-level health factors - Operations, efficiency, and community-feedback analysis — streamlining public health workflows - Public communications and multilingual translation hub — breaking language barriers in health messaging - Automated clinical-data retrieval and FHIR query engine — using the HL7 standard to exchange healthcare information electronically
"Every major technological transformation succeeds or fails based on trust, governance and execution," said Dr. David Lakey, former Texas health commissioner. "PULSE will support agencies in this endeavor, and is specifically designed for practical implementation."
Nearly 40% of local health departments are not currently using AI, according to data from the National Association of County and City Health Officials cited by CHAI. The program aims to produce implementation playbooks by 2027 that other agencies can use as reference material.
The initiative has drawn prominent supporters. Dr. Ashish Jha, former White House COVID-19 response coordinator, said: "We know AI is going to reshape how we deliver public health — the question is whether we do it thoughtfully or not. PULSE will test which applications work and document the findings for other agencies."
However, the announcement leaves several governance questions unanswered. CHAI has not published specific evaluation criteria, privacy requirements, or human-review protocols for the five use cases. The organization has not specified whether the pilots will use identifiable health records, de-identified information, or synthetic data. It also has not defined the minimum staffing, infrastructure, or cybersecurity requirements for participating jurisdictions.
OpenAI stated that inputs and outputs from its business services are not used to train or improve its models by default, and Anthropic confirmed the same policy for its commercial products. However, the announcement did not define retention periods, access controls, or audit arrangements for the PULSE deployments.
The pilots are scheduled to begin in autumn 2026, with resulting playbooks expected in 2027.
