The Coalition for Health AI launched the Public Health Use Case and Learning Scaling Engine (PULSE), a national initiative that will engage 2,000 public health practitioners to develop and pilot five generative AI use cases for state and local health agencies.
The non-profit secured enterprise-level LLM access donated by OpenAI, Anthropic and Accenture to support the program. Participating agencies will form communities of practice around specific use cases, with the goal of producing repeatable frameworks that other public health organizations can adopt.
“Every major technological transformation succeeds or fails based on trust, governance and execution,” said Dr. David Lakey, former Texas health commissioner, in the announcement.
CHAI’s leadership council will select participating entities and assign practitioners to their preferred use-case groups. The initiative targets state, tribal, local and territorial public health agencies, which have historically lagged behind clinical health systems in AI adoption despite managing critical population health data.
Public health agencies in the US have faced chronic underfunding of their IT infrastructure, making them particularly vulnerable to both the promise and risk of generative AI tools. CHAI’s structured evaluation approach aims to produce evidence-based guidance before widespread deployment.
The PULSE program represents one of the largest coordinated efforts to bring generative AI into public health operations, with a focus on responsible evaluation rather than rapid deployment.
