Healthcare AI Security Checklist
Before connecting AI to clinical or revenue-cycle workflows, healthcare organizations should understand exactly how protected information is handled.
Healthcare AI can touch clinical notes, patient demographics, eligibility information, claims, financial information, and other sensitive data.
Security and compliance therefore need to be part of the buying decision from the beginning.
Here are key questions every organization should ask.
Business Associate Agreements
Determine whether the vendor will create, receive, maintain, or transmit protected health information.
Where applicable, confirm that appropriate Business Associate Agreements are in place with the vendor and relevant subprocessors.
Encryption
Understand how sensitive information is protected both in transit and at rest.
Organizations should also understand how credentials, tokens, backups, and data exports are protected.
Access control
Ask how users are authenticated and authorized.
Look for appropriate role-based access controls, account management, logging, and administrative visibility.
AI model usage
One of the most important questions:
Is customer data used to train public or shared AI models?
Organizations should understand what data reaches AI providers, how it is processed, whether it is retained, and whether it can be used for model training.
Audit logging
Healthcare organizations should be able to understand who accessed information, what actions were performed, and when significant events occurred.
For AI-assisted clinical or coding workflows, traceability of recommendations is particularly important.
Data retention and deletion
Ask: How long is information retained? Where is it stored?
What happens when the customer requests deletion? What remains in backups?
Subprocessors
AI solutions often rely on cloud infrastructure, identity providers, analytics systems, communications tools, or model vendors.
Healthcare organizations should understand the vendor's critical subprocessors and their role.
Incident response
Ask the vendor how security incidents are detected, investigated, contained, and communicated.
Policies matter, but operational readiness matters more.
Security is a continuous process
No badge or single certification replaces sound security practices.
Healthcare organizations should evaluate the architecture, policies, contractual protections, technical controls, and operational processes supporting the technology.