However, trust and affordability, especially for smaller organizations, are major obstacles to agentic AI adoption in healthcare. The nature of agentic AI means it can interact with data and act on its own to complete tasks. At the 2025 CHIME Fall Forum, Nichole Niesen, director of automation at Corewell Health, recommended that healthcare organizations use caution if they allow agents to make decisions without human verification.
In addition to the risks presented by AI agents acting alone, the technology also brings security risks. Managing human identities is hard enough, and adding machine identities to the mix creates more complexity.
While these challenges create important considerations for healthcare organizations interested in agentic AI, adoption is likely to grow as organizations increasingly value productivity amid rising costs of care delivery.
2. Organizations Balance Security and Clinical Workflows
A proposed HIPAA update from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services could require mandatory data backup and recovery, regular security testing, multifactor authentication, real-time monitoring, encryption, network segmentation, and anti-malware software.
If the update is enacted, healthcare organizations with limited resources are likely to have trouble complying.
“The proposal would dramatically expand and fundamentally alter existing federal cybersecurity requirements for hospitals and healthcare providers. While providers firmly agree that cyber safety is patient safety, signatories warn that the rule would impose significant unfunded mandates, mandate prescriptive technical controls that conflict with modern healthcare IT architectures, and substantially increase documentation, reporting and compliance burdens for already stretched IT and security teams,” noted a press release on a signed letter by a group of more than 100 healthcare organization representatives led by the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives.
EXPLORE: Accelerate rapid cyber recovery with cyber resilient automation strategies.
Many healthcare organizations face a balancing act: Ensure strong data protections and cybersecurity practices to prevent a loss of patient trust and the financial loss that can follow a successful ransomware attack while also prioritizing patient care, patient experiences and clinician experiences.
AI is complicating the cybersecurity landscape, and a focus on robust cybersecurity practices will be needed in 2026, but healthcare organizations still need to combat the rising cost of care while providing excellent patient care.
However, it is possible for organizations to navigate this complexity successfully. This year, healthcare organizations will likely tackle foundational security elements such as addressing identity and access management while leaning into automated processes and continuous monitoring.
3. Focus On the Smart Care Continuum, and Patient Experience Grows
Patients are used to the digital experiences offered by their banks and airlines. They’ve come to expect that ease in other areas of their lives, including their interactions with healthcare. This is something the industry is aware of and working toward, but many patients are still left with fragmented and frustrating processes. This is especially true for patients as they move through the care continuum, such as transitioning from post-acute care to home health.
Healthcare engagements are often treated as episodic, and lack of electronic health record integrations can result in inefficiencies, such as patients having to repeat information or important information not being shared. For example, a patient with a follow-up appointment at a specialist clinic within a larger health system may end up in the hospital; that information won’t be updated globally in the patient record, and rather than the specialist being informed and the appointment rescheduled, that appointment slot will go to waste and the patient may have to dispute a no-show fee.
Click the banner below to sign up for HealthTech’s weekly newsletter.
