The Paragon Health Institute, a conservative health policy think tank, has launched an AI Initiative that will deliver market-based policy recommendations to the Trump administration and Congress on AI in healthcare.
Paragon already has an ear with the administration. Its president, Brian Blase, was an economic advisor to President Donald Trump during his first term and formerly worked at the Heritage Foundation. Moreover, several Paragon directors and advisers joined the second Trump administration to lead health policy. Some of the think tank's proposals, including limits on states' use of federal Medicaid funds, also made it into the text of last summer's One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
The Health AI initiative will be led by Kev Coleman, a technologist and healthcare researcher, who has already published several policy papers on the topic as a research fellow at Paragon.
Paragon Health's AI Initiative will focus on policies to lower the cost of U.S. healthcare through AI; use the technology to root out fraud, waste and abuse in the system; and resist “rulemaking with a sledgehammer,” Coleman said in an interview.
Another key objective is to prevent a patchwork of state AI laws that stymy innovation and raise compliance costs for companies, Coleman said. He hopes to educate lawmakers and regulators on the diverse uses of AI and to help them understand the tradeoffs between different regulatory approaches.
“I think so long as we're looking to balance these competing interests, privacy, existing legal frameworks, greater efficiency, that we'll be able to have good results,” Coleman said. “The things that you don't want to have is just a sloppy cowboy approach of 'Let's go do it, and then we'll kind of clean up the mess afterwards.'”
His last paper on post-deployment monitoring of AI was co-authored by Michael Pencina, chief AI scientist at UnitedHealth Group. His next paper on AI generalization will be published in early February.
The Paragon Health Institute’s connection to the Trump administration has allowed Coleman to get many meetings with government regulators in various health agencies, he said.
“We're not going to succeed with the transformation of American healthcare through AI without a lot of discussions, without the best minds in the field collaborating and debating with one another on the best possible approaches,” he explained.
Coleman hopes both sides of the political aisle are receptive to his policy ideas.
Coleman agreed that the Trump administration will likely not be doing traditional notice-and-comment rulemaking on AI. Rather, they are much more likely to work directly with tech companies on public-private collaborations or offer grants to solve health AI policy issues.
“I think that, to their credit, they really understand AI is changing the game, and as such, they're reaching out to ... some of the big names within the tech field, within the larger AI ecosystem, to try to see how they can innovate,” Coleman said. “I think there's also an openness to public-private collaborations. Part of the reason for this is that if you take a look at public statements from the FDA, they've expressed concern about their own limitations on kind of exhaustive oversight on AI.”
In addition to publishing policy papers, Coleman will continue to do speaking events related to health AI policy and “evangelize” Paragon’s health AI policies to the private sector.