Senate committee advances Ernst’s bipartisan veterans healthcare bill

The U.S. Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee on July 16 advanced a bipartisan bill sponsored by U.S. Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA) to improve healthcare services for America’s military veterans.

“We owe it to our veterans to provide them the best care possible,” Sen. Ernst said. “In order to tackle the wide array of health concerns our veterans face — such as traumatic brain injuries and post-traumatic stress — we need an all-of-the-above approach.”

Sen. Ernst’s bill, the Department of Energy Veterans’ Health Initiative Act, S. 143, which would streamline data sharing between the U.S. Department of Veterans’ Affairs (VA) and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to improve health outcomes, now moves to the full chamber for action.

“This bipartisan legislation will allow for greater collaboration between government agencies to help solve complex data challenges and to advance veterans’ health care,” the senator said.

If enacted, the purpose of S. 143 would be to advance DOE expertise in artificial intelligence and high-performance computing toward improving veterans’ health outcomes by supporting basic research through the application of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and large-scale data analytics to identify and solve challenges in the health sciences, according to the bill’s text.

Additionally, DOE expertise would be improved via maximizing the impact of the VA’s health and genomics data housed at the National Laboratories, as well as data from other sources; promoting collaborative research by establishing partnerships to improve data sharing between federal agencies, National Laboratories, institutions of higher education, and nonprofits; establishing multiple scientific computing user facilities to house and provision available data; and by driving the development of technology to improve artificial intelligence, high-performance computing, and networking, according to the text of the bill.

Among the six cosponsors of S. 143 are U.S. Sens. Mike Rounds (R-SD), Cory Gardner (R-CO) and Maggie Hassan (D-NH).