Balancing the benefits of AI in healthcare with security and privacy risks

A risk-based approach recommends that providers invest more effort in high-risk areas and less effort in low-risk areas. At the same time, a company’s internal audit and compliance investments should be aligned with the key risks faced to maximize risk-return.

Five Risk Areas

Healthcare organizations face the five highest risk areas that internal audit and compliance leaders should assess as they plan for 2024 and ensure they are included within consideration.

• AI and New Technologies
• Competition
• Cybersecurity and Data Privacy
• Financial Performance
• Workforce

Risk areas are areas that may hinder a healthcare organization’s ability to achieve its goals in key areas. These areas include patient care, compliance, operations, strategic growth and financial performance.

Various risk areas severely undermine the core capabilities of healthcare provider organizations. Moreover, the impact of these risk areas can spread throughout the enterprise, further increasing risks in other areas.

AI’s growing impact in healthcare

AI tools based on the GenAI model are expected to bring significant benefits to medical institutions. These tools can improve the efficiency of medical practices and health systems and deliver better care.

Although smart technology has been used in the medical industry for many years, AI and other tools are becoming increasingly accepted throughout the industry as new use cases are continuously developed. Healthcare providers can enable faster, more accurate diagnosis and treatment decisions, increase efficiency, improve outcomes, and enhance the patient consumer experience by automating different aspects of various processes, such as appointment scheduling.

To unlock these benefits, healthcare provider organizations need to take steps to mitigate a range of risks. First, they need to ensure that large amounts of protected health information are stored and protected. This means they need to build secure storage systems that use encryption to protect data confidentiality. In addition, they need to develop strict access control policies to ensure that only authorized personnel can access this sensitive information. Secondly, it is also crucial to protect the training data of AI models from malicious actors. To prevent the introduction of bad data, healthcare provider organizations need to implement effective data validation and screening mechanisms. This includes a review of data sources to ensure data accuracy and reliability. In addition, they will need to monitor the use of data in a timely manner

Benefits of AI Tools

In addition to the numerous benefits of AI and new technologies, healthcare organizations also need to be aware of some security and privacy risks . As companies acquire and store more health information and sensitive patient data, these organizations become more valuable targets and the risk of associated data breaches increases.

When measuring the cost of an AI tool’s overall impact on financial performance, we must weigh its effectiveness against the cost of implementing AI and training employees to use the tools properly.

The benefits of AI tools can only be realized if organizations can address the employee challenges of recruiting employees with the right skills to manage these tools and their attendant risks, and training employees to use these tools. AI automation may also increase attrition rates as employees without the skills required to use these tools leave the organization, increasing legal, reputational and cultural risks.

The top risks we identified will affect each healthcare organization in different ways, based on each healthcare organization's current capabilities, market characteristics and other factors. As a healthcare leader, you must assess the impact of these risks on your organization and then develop an internal audit and compliance program that allocates limited resources to your organization's most impactful risk areas.

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