Unlocking Frontline Innovation with AI
Challenge
In an era filled with more AI-hype than results, a public health leader sought to unlock innovation by empowering their front-line employees with AI. Currently, public health innovation can be slow-moving, hindered by legacy systems and external dependencies, with clinicians and program staff lacking the tools or authority to develop their own innovations, let alone AI solutions. As a result, innovation is outsourced, creating a disconnect between those delivering care and those designing the technology meant to support it.
Approach
In partnership with our client, HRG developed a three-phase program to generate, ideate, and winnow potential healthcare innovations generated by innovation teams with members from both the public and private sectors. Over the course of a year, HRG supported our client to develop each of the three phases of the program, including:
Ideate: a multi-day “Hackathon” where non-technical clinical staff—those in care delivery, counseling, and program operations—form teams with participants from the private sector and academia to identify key issues to solve and design AI-based solution concepts
Validate: a multi-month innovation curriculum, where the winning teams of the Hackathon go through intensive training on public sector innovation requirements, business process fundamentals, how to scale solutions, and ultimately deliver an internal investment case for project funding
Build: a multi-month technology “Accelerator” for the strongest investment cases, where each team receives feedback from expert working groups representing senior agency leadership, and technical SMEs that coach and provide mentorship on the creation of working prototypes in preparation for piloting post-program
Additionally, HRG leveraged partnerships with private sector collaborators for a secure, cloud-based development environment, providing a scalable space where staff can quickly experiment, iterate, and refine AI applications, bypassing long lead times and the complexity of traditional IT processes. This allows government employees to learn how to define user requirements, participate in full lifecycle development, and test solutions—all without requiring a technical background.
Impact
In only its first iteration, the program created dozens of newly-trained public sector innovators and more than a half dozen functioning, custom-built AI prototypes. These prototypes are solving real front-line problems, built by the clinicians and staff who experience the pain points first-hand. One senior leader described it as 'the most interesting use case of AI I've seen across the entire federal government.' Rather than expensive AI-hype, the agency has begun unlocking measurable AI-powered impact delivered by their own employees.