The fear that AI will hollow out healthcare cybersecurity careers is not one Anahi Santiago shares — but she recently got a close-up look at how the anxiety is landing on the people around her.
Ms. Santiago’s executive assistant, who is working toward a career in information security, asked her during a recent check-in: “I hear that AI is taking away all the security jobs. Should I still pursue this path?”
“I don’t believe cybersecurity is replacing anyone’s job,” said Ms. Santiago, chief information security officer of Newark, Del.-based ChristianaCare, during a Sept. 14 panel discussion at Becker’s IT + Revenue Cycle Conference in Chicago. “[AI is] creating so much work, so much volume, so much stress.”
“And yes, it might remove some of the autonomous things that should have been automated 10 years ago, but it’s just going to create capacity for the team to be able to do more rewarding, value-added things,” she said.
“But I do not believe that AI is going to just flat out replace the jobs, because I now have to think about nonhuman identities and what they’re doing, and you’re crawling outside sandboxes, and every day I hear a nightmare story about what happened. That’s what keeps me up at night, which leads me to believe that my job and my team’s jobs are not going away.”
Rather than worry about AI eroding her staffing pipeline, Ms. Santiago has spent the past few years building a new one. A few years ago, an organization reached out to her about a Department of Labor grant that funded free networking and security certification training for anyone at ChristianaCare who wanted it. About 157 employees signed up — roughly half from IT, the rest from elsewhere in the hospital, including clinicians, administrative assistants and technicians.
“Some fell off because it was intensive, in addition to their day-to-day jobs,” Ms. Santiago said. “But we graduated 87 individuals, and it’s been a pipeline. My administrative assistant went through it. She’s aspiring, and at some point I will hire her. I’ve had three other people on my team that I hired through that program.”
Brian Lancaster, senior vice president and CIO of Children’s Mercy Kansas City (Mo.), described a tighter version of the same problem: not entry-level workers displaced by AI, but too few skilled cybersecurity professionals to hire in the first place.
“I can’t find the cybersecurity professionals I need, let alone the AI-knowledgeable ones,” Mr. Lancaster said during the panel.
That gap is pushing him toward the same solution Santiago landed on: building the pipeline in-house rather than waiting for it to show up.
“I love the example of creating a career path into cybersecurity, and that’s something we’ve been exploring as well,” he said, pointing to a hospital training program Children’s Mercy already uses to move nonclinical staff into clinical roles, which he is now working to adapt for IT. “Maybe at help desk, maybe at initial incident response, that sort of career path, and allow them to build from there.”
He said staff who already understand how a hospital floor runs bring something a traditional IT hire often doesn’t.
“If you really understand the clinical workflow and the floors … and come into IT, that’s super helpful,” Mr. Lancaster said. “Just have context.”
AI is changing what entry-level cybersecurity work looks like, but it isn’t eliminating the need for people to do it. In a field still short on talent, these leaders said, the harder problem is building the pipeline fast enough to keep up.
