Issue: ORN-2026-36

NIH seeks to engage patients as it scales use of AI with Bio Genesis Mission: The National Institutes of Health is opening multiple avenues for patient feedback as it increasingly adopts artificial intelligence through initiatives such as the Bio Genesis Mission, the agency’s contribution to the Trump administration’s broader Genesis Mission. “That's what we want. We want to see that active engagement in the community,”  Bradley Bower, NIH’s Chief AI Officer, said Thursday at the Special Competitive Studies Project’s AI+ Health Summit. “Pretty much every new AI-focused program we're building up… all of them include a co-design approach where patients, clinicians, anybody that is engaged as a stakeholder in the process has to be involved,” Bower added.

NIH’s AIM-AHEAD program, which seeks to instill AI expertise in biomedical researchers from underserved communities, is one example of an agency initiative looking to learn from patients, according to Bower. The program, originally started in 2021, relies on national networks of institutions and organizations to teach researchers how to harness AI for medical imaging, electronic health record data analysis and other applications. More information is posted on the NextGov website.

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Tech bills of the week: Community protection from data centers; AI labs for education; and more: A new legislative package looks to address government management of data center construction amid artificial intelligence-motivated demands for increased compute capacity. The National Data Center Plan, introduced on Tuesday by Rep. Suhas Subramanyam, D-Va., is composed of four distinct bills that address different concerns surrounding data center construction. 

The first, the Responsible Data Center Siting Act, directs the Energy secretary to create best practices for choosing sites for new data centers, taking issues like energy availability, noise pollution, workforce needs and water and electricity use into account. 

The second, the Data Infrastructure Energy Measurement and Standards Act, also focuses on resource usage and asks the National Institute of Standards and Technology to develop technical standards for accurately measuring data center energy and water use.

The third, the Data Infrastructure Risk Reduction Act, requires leadership from both the Department of Homeland Security and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency to collaborate with the Defense secretary in developing a defense strategy to protect communities living near data centers. The strategy will also address how to protect the U.S. data infrastructures from adversaries. 

The final bill, the Data Center Fair Share Act, requires data centers and large energy consumers to pay the full cost of grid upgrades needed to handle growing compute loads. The bill would call for states to adopt large-load tariffs to ensure that data centers pay for the amount of power they consume.  More information is posted on the NextGov website.