Spotlight on SAMHSA – FORUM Innovation Award
This June, SeKON was proud to accept the FORUM Innovation Award on the behalf of SAMHSA for 2024. The award was given for the SAMHSA Find Help initiative, which established clear pathways to relevant information for users who are looking for information related to mental health and substance use treatment and support. This includes innovations such as the SAMHSA Sammy chatbot, which will help guide the users towards this vital information with bespoke utterances and future AI integrations and machine learning. It was a joy to celebrate the hard work of our many team members at SeKON and SAMHSA that went into the creation of this vital information and simplified access to it.
But awards were not all that was discussed at the ceremony! Other discussion topics were related to the overarching theme: “Empowering Innovation: Fostering Ethical AI, Amplifying Small Agency/Small Business Impact, and Enhancing Agency Intercommunication.” A couple of the engaging topics of the day were the complexities of creating ethical AI frameworks and revamping FedRAMP to better empower small businesses.
In regard to the complexities of ethical AI frameworks, one of the largest points made was towards the importance of data model maintenance and monitoring. Data input into a model carries inherent biases, be it from the sources chosen for input or from the creators of the data itself. It is important to not only check what is being used in the model, but also ensure that the data used in the continuous training does not get tainted by external biases. They also stressed that it is important for strong leadership and industry collaboration in the adoption of AI, so that strong ethical frameworks are maintained.
For the FedRAMP panel, the focus was on ways to adjust the FedRAMP model to better support small businesses, which are critical innovators in the government space. Their main points were to increase the accessibility of FedRAMPed technologies to small businesses, mostly through changes to pricing models. This includes blanket purchasing agreements for agencies to streamline requests and advocating for more flexible contracting that would give small businesses more access and ways to use FedRAMPed technologies.
Congratulations again to SAMHSA for winning 2024 Innovation Award, and to our continuing work forward on this contract!
