The Departments of Veteran Affairs (VA), Health and Human Services (HHS), and Energy are partnering on a new initiative to share COVID-19 health data to enable the research and expertise on the virus.
The COVID-19 Insights Partnership, launched today, is a high-performance computing and artificial intelligence resource initiative that establishes the framework for VA, HHS, and Energy to pool tech and data resources during the pandemic.
“Our nation’s understanding of COVID-19 has already benefitted greatly from our world-leading high-performance computing and artificial intelligence resources and we look forward to continuing our coordination across Federal departments and agencies in the fight against this virus,” Secretary of Energy Dan Brouillette said.
The Department of Energy is a leader of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy’s COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium. Launched in March, the consortium is a similar initiative focused on teaming Federal agencies, industry, and academia to provide supercomputing resources to COVID-19 researchers.
The new COVID-19 Insights Partnership will first focus on vaccine and therapeutic development, as well as other topics to further the nation’s understanding of the virus.
“This unprecedented data and computing partnership is the latest addition to President Trump’s whole-of-government effort against COVID-19,” HHS Secretary Alex Azar said of the partnership. “The volume and quality of the data HHS has on COVID-19 has advanced by leaps and bounds in recent months. The Department of Energy’s world-class resources will help us derive new insights from the data we gather to help patients and protect our country.”
