Susan Monarez, President Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), on Wednesday pledged her commitment to using AI tech to support CDC operations and public health outcomes.
During her confirmation hearing before the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, Monarez outlined her top priorities which include improving “data transparency with a focus on protecting patient privacy and security,” as well as “strengthening public health infrastructure.”
“Health technology innovation is America’s next frontier,” Monarez said. “We must invest in innovation to prevent, detect, and respond to threats. I will prioritize near real-time situational awareness to detect outbreaks early.”
“I will prioritize bringing state-of-the-art technologies to CDC, including our labs and diagnostic development. I will work with state and local public health officials to help build a modernized public health infrastructure across the country,” she pledged.
To meet those priorities, the nominee said she plans to “bring in AI technologies.”
Monarez told lawmakers that she led efforts to develop breakthroughs in AI tech during her time as deputy director of the Advanced Research and Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) under the Biden administration.
“When I think about AI, the first thing I say is, ‘What problems are we trying to solve?’ And when you can define accurately what the problems are you are trying to solve, it allows you to have a disciplined way to incorporate these technologies that are really transforming what we think about in health innovation,” Monarez said.
“I’ll be using AI technologies to help support CDC to create a modernized and operationally efficient organization where we look at, how do we optimize our workforce? How do we make sure that our IT is supportive of internal operations and partnerships with state and locals? How do we make sure that we achieve fiscal responsibility through accurate tracking of all of our resource expenditures? I’ll also be incorporating AI technologies as we continue to support public health outcomes,” she said.
Monarez also stressed the importance of monitoring AI technologies and making sure that the training data used in the AI tool “stays consistent with the evolution of your organization,” patients, and potential therapeutic interventions.
“These AI technologies can be incredibly valuable, and they can incorporate and retain information that well exceeds the single human’s ability to interface with a particular challenge, but it needs to be done in a disciplined way,” Monarez said, adding, “Because you can create better outcomes, but you also have to make sure that you’re mitigating any risks about having these technologies incorporated without the right safeguards.”
President Trump nominated Monarez to serve as the director of the CDC in March after the administration withdrew its first nominee, David Weldon.
Monarez has served as acting CDC director since late January.