As Artificial Intelligence (AI) becomes more prominent in today’s world, the Accessible Healthcare through AI-Augmented Decisions (AHeAD) center will provide the resources necessary to integrate AI into the healthcare industry.
The AHeAD center is a project that multiple universities outside of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette have collaborated on, including Tulane, Georgia Tech and the University of Florida.
The goal of this project is to make AI-related healthcare more obtainable to areas that may not be able to reach it, including more rural areas of the country.
This project is being funded through federal grants, industry contributions and university funding.
Each university has a main leader and around five other active faculty members. There are several people involved in the project, including AI research scientists, professors from the School of Computing and Informatics and the College of Nursing and Health Sciences. There are between 20-30 active participants that are consistently working to bring this center to life.
Raju Gottumukkala is the lead for UL Lafayette, Aron Culotta is the lead for Tulane, Joel Harley for the University of Florida and Ghassan AlRegib for Georgia Tech.
According to Becker’s Hospital Review, in 2024, 71% of United States hospitals used AI to assist with electronic health records (EHR) and 80% of U.S. hospitals used AI to improve quality of care and workplace efficiency. The AHeAD center will work to increase those numbers as AI becomes more readily available to the medical industry.
Raju Gottumukkala, director for center for applied AI and applied AI associate professor with the mechanical engineering department, said, “There’s a lot of innovation that is happening in healthcare there is… several hundreds of startups that are in the healthcare space, in AI and healthcare space, there is so much innovation that is happening, even from the big tech companies in the healthcare space.”
“A lot of innovation is happening and we as a university wanted to do something meaningful for our state, and health care is a very important area for our state because we are ranked so poorly in many of the healthcare outcomes, like chronic diseases and mental health outcomes and so on.”
According to the Commonwealth Fund, Louisiana has been ranked 41st in the U.S. for overall health system performance in 2025. The top three ranked states in the U.S. are Massachusetts, Hawaii and New Hampshire.
AI has been used in the healthcare industry since the 1950s, when the first robotic arm was constructed, but its use blew up in the 1960s when Joseph Weizenbaum created the first chatterbox, Eliza.
PubMed Central wrote, “Eliza’s system detected key words within the input text and then generated responses based on reassembly rules. In this way, Eliza curated text responses that could simulate conversation with a human therapist.”
In 1971, INTERNIST-1 was developed as “the world’s first artificial medical consultant.” Once inputting a patient’s symptoms into the creation, it could use a search engine to help to find a fitting diagnosis.
DXplain was developed in the 1980s and performed similar tasks to INTERNIST-1, but had a more extensive medical catalog to pull information from when diagnosing. Since then, the use of AI has only expanded and been more thoroughly researched and curated, helping to save patient lives everyday.
The American Medical Association stated that as of June 2025, 250 health AI-related bills have been passed by state legislatures across 34 U.S. states. These bills attempt to manage and regulate AI use in healthcare while protecting patients and physicians during AI use.
Gottumukkala said, “If faculty are interested in collaborating in this area of AI and healthcare broadly… I would love to work with them on this journey. I think our center is very broad, and there’s a lot of scope for collaborative research between different departments and disciplines.”
The physical AHeAD center will be located in Lafayette as a part of the University’s campus.