Episode Details

In this episode, Vrajesh Bhavsar, CEO & Co-founder at Operant AI, discusses the AI security blind spot that healthcare can’t afford to ignore.

Highlights of this episode include:

• What’s the AI risk that most hospital leaders still don’t fully appreciate
• Zero-click vulnerability
• How autonomous AI fundamentally can challenge the compliance model healthcare
• Why traditional security tools struggle to keep pace with the way AI actually moves data inside a health system
• What the real financial and reputational costs are when a healthcare AI deployment goes wrong
• What the first steps are to take to understand their actual exposure

Kelly Wisness: Hi, this is Kelly Wisness. Welcome back to the award-winning Hospital Finance Podcast. We’re pleased to welcome Vrajesh Bhavsar. VJ is an engineer with a Master’s in Computer Science from USC and over 20 years of experience building hardware and software products. VJ built core technologies for iOS and Mac OS, including dynamic tracing, data protection, and secure enclave at Apple. He holds eight patents in distributed systems, data, and security. He is passionate about building technology-first businesses that drive positive human impact at scale.

In this episode, we’re discussing the AI security blind spot that healthcare can’t afford to ignore. Welcome, and thank you for joining us, VJ.

Vrajesh Bhavsar: Hey, thank you for having me.

Kelly: Well, let’s go ahead and jump in. So, AI is being deployed across healthcare at a remarkable pace. From a cybersecurity standpoint, what’s the risk that most hospital leaders still don’t fully appreciate?

VJ: That’s a great question. And it’s such an exciting time that we are living in. There are so many new innovations coming to the entire space. And the impact of AI in so many different areas gets really exciting for a lot of industries where this kind of innovation is needed. And, of course, healthcare has so many different areas where AI can be applied, but also there are a lot of risks that come in when you are exposing this kind of critical area of safety and care to this kind of new innovation. And so the big risks that we see in a lot of interactions we are having is how when you have a lot of kind of new innovation getting sprinkled across use cases and areas where you didn’t really understand the full scope and things are operating without a lot of visibility, especially in the deep areas where sensitive data is in question and you have patient information as well as ways that a lot of the third party systems are going to interface with these things. That’s where there are so many risks that it’s not fully understood and appreciated.

And the thing that really gets people is that we are used to kind of operating with these innovative systems in kind of traditional systematic ways, that A plus B results in something. But in the world of non-determinism, where there are a lot of new attacks coming in, the level of risk real