AI & Data Exchange 2026: NIH’s Susan Gregurick on overcoming data silos with AI analytics
AI & Data Exchange 2026: NIH’s Susan Gregurick on overcoming data silos with AI analytics
Publish Date: 2026-05-08 14:18:00
Source Domain: federalnewsnetwork.com
The National Institutes of Health is leaning into artificial intelligence to gather insights from a vast amount of health data — a shift that could allow the agency to conduct research more quickly and offer new tools to support clinicians.
Susan Gregurick, associate director for data science at NIH, said during Federal News Network’s AI & Data Exchange 2026 that advances in AI are beginning to unlock insights from data across disconnected systems.
“I think that there’s just an unlimited amount of excitement here,” Gregurick said. “I’ve seen some really exciting trends in developing AI technologies that can extract very difficult-to-find data from clinical records and notes that doctors take.”
AI to speed public health responses
At the core of NIH’s AI push is a push to break down data silos that have limited how quickly researchers can respond to emerging public health issues.
NIH is using AI in partnership with the Energy Department and the National Cancer Institute to extract information from pathology reports. Through this project, NIH is helping researchers get a better understanding of the relationship between COVID infections and cancer progression.
“The challenges we get really have to deal with getting real-time data about health,” she said. “It was very hard to understand the relationship between people who might have had COVID and the effect it would have on cancer progression,” Gregurick said.
“If you are a cancer patient, your diagnosis is going to come from a pathology report that’s in a completely different system than your electronic health record data. That program really does extract out the pertinent information from the pathology reports and then feeds it into our system for understanding cancer.”
Mining massive datasets
Beyond extracting insights from individual records, NIH is also…
