During their recent “A Better Approach to Healthcare Security & Compliance” webinar, Sean Balzer, Senior Security Consultant at IPP’s partner, Tenax Solutions, opened with three questions: Do you believe AI will transform healthcare? Are your employees already using it? And are you confident your organization actually knows where and how? For most rooms, hands go up on the first two questions and drop fast on the third — and that gap is where risk lives.
The pace of change is the real story. Postage became email in 1996. Libraries became Google in 1998. Desktops became mobile in 2007. Then in 2022, AI started doing nearly everything, for nearly everyone, almost overnight. One healthcare CEO put it this way: “I feel like I just traded a Honda Civic for an F1 car.” Powerful, yes — but only safe with the right training, guardrails, and pit crew.
Balzer walked through two cautionary tales. In Ontario in 2024, a physician used an unauthorized AI transcription tool during clinical activities, capturing a sensitive hospital meeting with no vendor approval and no privacy review — classic “shadow AI.” In 2025, Xsolis, an AI-powered healthcare analytics vendor, suffered a breach exposing identifiers, insurance, and medical information for roughly 1.4 million patients — a reminder that vendor security is your security.
Most failed AI projects share the same root causes: no defined purpose, no executive ownership, “it’s AI” as the entire deployment strategy, and no incident response plan when something goes wrong. Meanwhile, AI policies often skip the details that matter most — model approval processes, data classification, and the AI features vendors like Salesforce and ServiceNow are quietly building into tools you already use.
The good news: AI cuts both ways. It’s also helping security teams review activity logs in minutes instead of days, spot new attack methods at the endpoint, and prioritize vulnerabilities faster than ever.
Before your next AI rollout, ask your team: What business problem are we actually solving? Who defines right and wrong? What does failure look like? And can we survive, financially and reputationally, if it goes wrong?
If you can’t answer those with confidence, that’s exactly what a Security Posture as a Service engagement is for — IT risk assessments, HIPAA compliance reviews, and AI security assessments, backed by vCISO guidance. Reach out to your Prairie Health Ventures team to get started.