The biggest roadblock to digital health’s future isn’t patient adoption or EHR interoperability. According to Ryan Cameron, executive vice president and chief information and innovation officer at Children’s Nebraska in Omaha, its identity management and the window to get ahead of it is closing fast.
During an upcoming Becker’s Healthcare Podcast conversation, Mr. Cameron said a new generation of AI-assisted tools that can identify software vulnerabilities with alarming speed and accuracy. He cited emerging agentic AI tools as a case in point, noting that such tools can successfully find a vulnerability 83% of the time, regardless of the application.
“You can’t just keep setting up gates and locks and gates and locks over and over again, because that’s no longer sufficient,” Mr. Cameron said. “Identity management is where we need to be really focused and I think it is absolutely true that all healthcare providers are really interested in digital health and remote patient monitoring are forced to be very reactive right now and very nervous about what the future is going to look like.”
The warning carries particular weight in pediatric care, where health systems like Children’s Nebraska are aggressively expanding digital health infrastructure — school-based telehealth, remote monitoring, longitudinal data platforms — that all depend on secure, trusted identity frameworks. Children’s Nebraska currently operates a school-based telehealth program in 30 schools across Nebraska, up from an initial eight, with plans to keep expanding.
The tension is a familiar one in cybersecurity: tools built to strengthen systems can be turned to exploit them. The same AI capability that helps developers find and patch vulnerabilities before deployment can be used by bad actors to locate them first. Anthropic’s Mythos, a recent example of AI-driven cybersecurity tools, and OpenAI’s Daybreak alongside GPT-5.5-Cyber are quickly changing the cybersecurity landscape.
“There’s two sides to that coin, and we’re already seeing AI-assisted attacks,” he said. “If you can imagine that you have a master key that can now open any lock, and the statistics coming from this are pretty compelling–I think around 83% of the time regardless of what application that Mythos looks like, it will find successfully a vulnerability so you can no longer lean on the security tools that we used to have.”
His prescription isn’t to slow down digital health expansion — it’s to build differently. The top leaders in healthcare are engaging in “deep, careful conversation” about identity management design, with resilience as the goal rather than perimeter defense. Systems need to be architected so that a single compromised credential or exploited vulnerability doesn’t cascade into a broader breach.
The urgency is compounded by how quickly the threat landscape is shifting.
“The roadblock is finding a smart way to design systems so that they really have a lot of resiliency,” he said. “You need to have exceptional identity management and we’re doing everything we can to be good stewards of patient data and healthcare data.”
Mr. Cameron connected the cybersecurity challenge to a broader concern about AI governance and data ownership in healthcare. Early-career graduates are now openly booing mentions of AI at graduation ceremonies as a signal that the industry is losing the public trust argument.
“It sends a signal to me that we need to make better decisions about governance, about data ownership, about doing things in such a way that this technology truly can be the best decision that humanity has ever made,” he said. “But there is an equal risk that it could be one of the worst decisions that we’ve ever made if we don’t get on top of it. What I’m curious about is what the call to action and response is going to look like from healthcare leaders. My hope is that others will join with us and continue to be very actively engaged in the conversation.”
Children’s Nebraska is attempting to get ahead of that curve. The health system is partnering with Boston Children’s Hospital, Stanford Children’s and other organizations through a collaborative called DIME to develop an AI playbook other hospitals can use.
“This is a perfect example of how hospitals can really not only be curious about the future, but own it,” he said.
At the Becker's 11th Annual IT + Revenue Cycle Conference: The Future of AI & Digital Health, taking place September 14–17 in Chicago, healthcare executives and digital leaders from across the country will come together to explore how AI, interoperability, cybersecurity, and revenue cycle innovation are transforming care delivery, strengthening financial performance, and driving the next era of digital health. Apply for complimentary registration now.
