The Digital Intelligence & Innovation (DI2) Accelerator – part of the Here & Next Digital Transformation initiative – is working in collaboration with WashU IT to empower faculty, staff and students to effectively and responsibly evaluate and adopt AI tools and platforms, including generative AI technologies such as ChatGPT. Over the next several weeks, we will be releasing some very exciting products for university-wide use, including introducing our first HIPAA-compliant generative AI platform.
Already available – a basic tool for non-sensitive data
Microsoft’s Bing Chat Enterprise is already available to all WashU employees (at the current time it is not available to students), and while this open AI solution states, “Searches and results are secure and private,” it is important to understand that personally identifiable, confidential or sensitive information should not be entered into the tool, and it does not meet HIPAA, FERPA or similar compliance requirements.
Access Bing Chat Enterprise at bing.com/chat or via the Microsoft Edge sidebar when logged in to your institutional Microsoft account.
Coming soon – fully compliant basics
A Beta version of a fully HIPAA-compliant generative AI tool will be released in late 2023. The tool will be available university-wide, providing a user-friendly resource to help with fundamental tasks that may assist in the conduct of common administrative, teaching, research, and clinical tasks. An expanded version of this tool will be released later in 2024.
Coming soon – higher functionality
We are also working to roll out generative AI resources for individuals requiring more complex functionality, including API endpoints that respond to programmatic inputs.
Research groups can stay up to date regarding these tools and technologies, including the ability to access additional open-source generative AI models in our research computing environments, by signing up for the DI2 Accelerator mailing list at di2accelerator.wustl.edu/signup.
Resources
Many AI tools and technologies are currently available in the rapidly evolving marketplace. Therefore, we encourage you to educate yourself and your teams on the appropriate and responsible use of these powerful tools. Our webpage at https://it.wustl.edu/ai contains many resources to get you started.
We look forward to providing further updates on this exciting new WashU Generative AI Environment – a place for faculty, students and staff to incorporate generative AI tools that improve efficiency, facilitate exceptional outputs, and equip users with the most tech-forward tools for their tasks.
As always, please reach out with your AI questions to aiquestions@wustl.edu.
Sincerely,
Philip R.O. Payne, PhD, FACMI, FAMIA, FAIMBE, FIAHSI
WashU Digital Transformation Chair
Janet and Bernard Becker Professor and Director, Institute for Informatics, Data Science and Biostatistics (I2DB)
Associate Dean for Health Information and Data Science, School of Medicine
Chief Data Scientist, School of Medicine
Jessie Minton
Vice Chancellor of Technology and Chief Information Officer