US health department unveils strategy to expand its adoption of AI
technology
[December 05, 2025]
By ALI SWENSON
NEW YORK (AP) — The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services on
Thursday outlined a strategy to expand its use of artificial
intelligence, building on the Trump administration’s enthusiastic
embrace of the rapidly advancing technology while raising questions
about how health information would be protected.
HHS billed the plan as a “first step” focused largely on making its work
more efficient and coordinating AI adoption across divisions. But the
20-page document also teased some grander plans to promote AI
innovation, including in the analysis of patient health data and in drug
development.
“For too long, our Department has been bogged down by bureaucracy and
busy-work,” Deputy HHS Secretary Jim O’Neill wrote in an introduction to
the strategy. “It is time to tear down these barriers to progress and
unite in our use of technology to Make America Healthy Again.”
The new strategy signals how leaders across the Trump administration
have embraced AI innovation, encouraging employees across the federal
workforce to use chatbots and AI assistants for their daily tasks. As
generative AI technology made significant leaps under President Joe
Biden’s administration, he issued an executive order to establish
guardrails for their use. But when President Donald Trump came into
office, he repealed that order and his administration has sought to
remove barriers to the use of AI across the federal government.
Experts said the administration's willingness to modernize government
operations presents both opportunities and risks. Some said that AI
innovation within HHS demanded rigorous standards because it was dealing
with sensitive data and questioned whether those would be met under the
leadership of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Some in Kennedy’s
own “Make America Health Again” movement have also voiced concerns about
tech companies having access to people’s personal information.
Strategy encourages AI use across the department
HHS’s new plan calls for embracing a “try-first” culture to help staff
become more productive and capable through the use of AI. Earlier this
year, HHS made the popular AI model ChatGPT available to every employee
in the department.
The document identifies five key pillars for its AI strategy moving
forward, including creating a governance structure that manages risk,
designing a suite of AI resources for use across the department,
empowering employees to use AI tools, funding programs to set standards
for the use of AI in research and development and incorporating AI in
public health and patient care.
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 It says HHS divisions are already
working on promoting the use of AI “to deliver personalized,
context-aware health guidance to patients by securely accessing and
interpreting their medical records in real time.” Some in Kennedy's
Make America Healthy Again movement have expressed concerns about
the use of AI tools to analyze health data and say they aren't
comfortable with the U.S. health department working with big tech
companies to access people's personal information.
HHS previously faced criticism for pushing legal boundaries in its
sharing of sensitive data when it handed over Medicaid recipients'
personal health data to Immigration and Customs Enforcement
officials.
Experts question how the department will ensure sensitive medical
data is protected
Oren Etzioni, an artificial intelligence expert who founded a
nonprofit to fight political deepfakes, said HHS’s enthusiasm for
using AI in health care was worth celebrating but warned that speed
shouldn’t come at the expense of safety.
“The HHS strategy lays out ambitious goals — centralized data
infrastructure, rapid deployment of AI tools, and an AI-enabled
workforce — but ambition brings risk when dealing with the most
sensitive data Americans have: their health information,” he said.
Etzioni said the strategy’s call for “gold standard science,” risk
assessments and transparency in AI development appear to be positive
signs. But he said he doubted whether HHS could meet those standards
under the leadership of Kennedy, who he said has often flouted rigor
and scientific principles.
Darrell West, senior fellow in the Brooking Institution’s Center for
Technology Innovation, noted the document promises to strengthen
risk management but doesn’t include detailed information about how
that will be done.
“There are a lot of unanswered questions about how sensitive medical
information will be handled and the way data will be shared,” he
said. “There are clear safeguards in place for individual records,
but not as many protections for aggregated information being
analyzed by AI tools. I would like to understand how officials plan
to balance the use of medical information to improve operations with
privacy protections that safeguard people’s personal information.”
Still, West, said, if done carefully, “this could become a
transformative example of a modernized agency that performs at a
much higher level than before.”
The strategy says HHS had 271 active or planned AI implementations
in the 2024 financial year, a number it projects will increase by
70% in 2025.
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