A LETTER FROM OUR CONVENERS
As we’re wrapping up the e-Health and Artificial Intelligence (e-HAIL) program’s fourth year and look ahead to the fifth, the importance of partnerships stands out. e-HAIL was established to foster partnerships between core AI faculty and clinical or biomedical experts to strengthen U-M’s position as a nationally recognized hub for groundbreaking AI & Health research. As an entity, e-HAIL is a partnership between the Medical School’s Office of Research and the Office of the Associate Dean for Research in the College of Engineering. Over the past years, e-HAIL has partnered with units and initiatives across Michigan Medicine, Engineering, and central campus.
This year’s impact report highlights some of the work enabled by e-HAIL’s core partnerships with the AI Lab, AI & Digital Health Innovation (AI&DHI), the Center for Global Health Equity (CGHE), the Institute for Health Policy Innovation (IHPI), the Medical School’s Office of Research, and others. We hope these stories inspire you both for the work that’s already being done as well as for the new ideas we can pursue together in the future. We’re always happy to hear from units, programs, and initiatives to partner with to build an ever stronger U-M footprint in AI for health research.
In the year ahead, e-HAIL is looking forward to strengthening its partnerships with AI&DHI as its core AI community focused on collaboration building and research development. One of e-HAIL’s defining features has been the importance placed on innovation in AI methodology as well as health. This equal focus on contributing to progress in the field of AI, and in health services or biomedical research, will remain a hallmark of the e-HAIL community in the coming year.
As always, e-HAIL is anchored in its core mission of research and faculty support through community/collaboration building, research/grant development, and shared resources. We are pleased to showcase in this report the support e-HAIL provides to facilitate its members to win federal and foundation grants, embark on new research projects, and achieve other successes. We welcome you to become part of e-HAIL’s dynamic community of faculty researchers who collaborate to advance AI and health at the University of Michigan and beyond.
Core Support Area Metrics
Grant Development
(FISCAL YEAR 2025 METRICS)
Hossam is a writer whose clarity and precision have been instrumental in helping my lab successfully compete for funding. His ability to learn and synthesize complex technical content and turn it into a compelling, coherent proposal has been a game-changer for our team.
- Devin McCaslin, PhD
Professor, Chief of Audiology – Otolaryngology
Shared Resources
(FISCAL YEAR 2025 METRICS)
Ye Chan Kim has been nothing short of a godsend in advancing our research in artificial intelligence and machine learning using vehicular telemetry data. He is not only knowledgeable and efficient but also is very personable and collaborative. He communicates extremely well with our teams, such that he can take an idea and optimize it beyond my expectations. To put it simply, my research would not be able to be performed without the innovative and thoughtful expertise Ye Chan provides. I am extremely grateful to have him as a collaborator!
- Raymond Jean, MD
Clinical Assistant Professor, Surgery
Celebrating Partnerships
AI & Digital Health Innovation
AI & Digital Health Innovation (AI&DHI) was announced in February 2025, with e-HAIL as one of its initial core communities of researchers. To mark the closer collaboration between our units, e-HAIL and AI&DHI are jointly hosting the 2025 AI & Health symposium on September 12, 2025.
AI tools and models have been a part of healthcare for years now, but our previous research has shown that they don’t always live up to their potential in real-world situations. We want to take them to the next level by closing the gap between technology and on-the-ground clinical situations. And I think our collaborative atmosphere and tools put us in a great position to do that.
Center for Global Health Equity
From its establishment, e-HAIL has supported international research partnerships, since the development and deployment of AI-based tools for improved health outcomes is as meaningful in the US as it is globally.
AI can help us reimagine pathology as a global resource, expanding the capability of providers to deliver timely, life-saving diagnoses regardless of the setting.
Michigan AI Lab
e-HAIL was established in May 2021, following a series of workshops and conversations between the AI lab and Michigan Medicine in anticipation of the increased importance of AI in healthcare in terms of both methodological as well as clinical innovation. This interview describes the history and future directions of the AI lab, including the importance of multidisciplinary collaboration between AI and content experts, as exemplified by e-HAIL’s community of researchers innovating simultaneously in AI & Health.
By investing in the fundamentals of AI, we’re not just refining existing technologies—we’re paving the way for applications that have the power to transform industries, improve lives, and address complex global challenges.
U-M Medical School Office of Research
eHealth is a priority in the U-M Medical School’s Office of Research (OoR) strategic research plan, Great Minds, Greater Discoveries. Bahaar Chawla, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow in OOR’s Research Organization, Management, and Strategy program, gained insights into how a strategic initiative such as e-HAIL functions through a six-week rotation with the program. In interviews with almost 30 e-HAIL members, Bahaar learned about their experience and interest in science communication to bring their research to a larger audience.
We’ve been seeing a growing understanding of the importance of science communication, and my rotation with e-HAIL allowed me to explore what faculty are already doing in this regard and where they would like support.
Institute for Healthcare Policy & Innovation
e-HAIL is an affiliated program of the Institute for Healthcare Policy & Innovation (IHPI), whose mission is to foster innovative, interdisciplinary research to inform healthcare policies and practices in order to improve health for individuals, families, and communities. Research projects by e-HAIL members who are also IHPI members pay particular attention to the ethical, legal, and social implications of the development and use of AI tools.
A lot of my research is talking to patients and the public about how AI is used in their care and how they think AI should be used in their care.
Research Stories: Projects in Process
Successful Collaboration Targets Deafness/Hearing Aids in Children
Dhruv Jain, PhD, and Devin McCaslin, PhD, were introduced to each other by e-HAIL program manager Henrike Florusbosch in 2024. Their collaboration has so far paid off in a William Demant Foundation grant to support their pioneering research to improve diagnostics and management of dizziness, and continues to flourish.
We write a number of multidisciplinary proposals and one of Hossam’s greatest strengths is taking the input from multiple writers with each contributing from their own area of expertise and transforming it into a unified, persuasive narrative. That skill alone has elevated the quality and competitiveness of our submissions.
Pieces of a Puzzle: Bringing Together Learning Sciences and Multimodal AI to Improve Medical Education
Vitaliy Popov, PhD, and Mohamed Abouelenien, PhD, received e-HAIL supplemental award funding for their project Leveraging Multimodal Sensing and Machine Learning for Shared Situational Awareness in Acute Care Teams in 2024/25.
We are trying to improve medical education so that clinicians can perform optimally, and through that save lives.
Collaborating, brainstorming, networking
Opportunities in AI for Healthy Aging Globally: e-HAIL in-person conversation
On a snowy day in February, e-HAIL and the Michigan AI Lab hosted an in-person discussion on the opportunities and challenges of AI-powered tools and approaches to enable healthy aging globally. A few months later, a grant application as well as an op-ed are in the works by a team of researchers who met at the event.
Office Hours: What e-HAIL’s Grant Writer, Programmer, and Other Support Can Do for You
e-HAIL’s periodic office hours and information sessions serve to introduce members to the support e-HAIL can provide for joint grant applications at the intersection of AI and Health. They focus on a specific service or source of support: grant writing and editing; programming; and programs for preliminary data collection and analysis. Special sessions in the past year have addressed timely issues around diversification of funding sources for research and science communication.
Symposium 2024
Attendance kept growing for the third annual symposium, but the interactive nature of the event remained. The keynote speakers, tabletop conversations, video research showcase, and panel discussion kept the audience engaged--and are back this year for the symposium’s fourth edition, now co-sponsored with AI&DHI and with additional support from IHPI.
Credits:
University of Michigan Medical School Office of Research