Hospitals and health systems face a growing cyberattack surface because of the increasing use of largely autonomous agentic AI.
Here are five updates:
1. As the Health Information Sharing and Analysis Center reported May 26: “Cyber risk is no longer confined to systems, networks, and data. It now lives in decisions. Employees decide what they click, what they share, what they configure, and increasingly what they delegate to AI systems and autonomous agents. The result is a rapidly expanding attack surface driven by human behavior and amplified by machines acting on human intent.”
2. The nonprofit pointed to a recent Verizon study that found staff mistakes accounted for a disproportionate share of healthcare data breaches.
3. Health-ISAC recommended that organizations institute a “human risk management maturity model” that includes workforce engagement, leadership endorsement and alignment, and having a strong security team.
4. It’s not only agentic AI inside the organization that health systems need to worry about. Advanced AI models like Anthropic’s Claude Mythos, which has not been released publicly over cybersecurity concerns, can pull off hacks autonomously — and health system leaders are pushing for more cooperation with the AI developers.
5. “Broadly, what will most rapidly enable our industry to safely adopt and utilize agentic AI is collaboration,” Omkar Kulkarni, vice president and chief innovation and transformation officer of Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, told Becker’s for an April 3 story. “When health systems can share best practices around agentic adoption — and, where appropriate, performance and accuracy data — we collectively strengthen the conditions for safe, efficient, and ethical deployment.”
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