NHS and HIPAA-Compliant AI: A Guide to Safe Healthcare Administration

Key Takeaways

AI can be a powerful tool for healthcare organizations, but only when used responsibly. To avoid PHI breaches, misdiagnoses, and poor patient experiences, steer clear of high-risk AI projects, and instead opt for non-clerical use cases. In this article, we outline the benefits of AI for healthcare administration, and provide a step-by-step rulebook for deploying NHS and HIPAA compliant AI.

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Deploying AI in healthcare is a tricky balancing act.

Staff shortages and rising patient demands necessitate efficiency-boosting technology. Yet, the sensitive nature of healthcare data makes hospitals, care homes, and other institutions a prime target for AI jailbreaking attacks and insider threats.

The compromise lies in the AI use cases you select — and the tools you use to facilitate them.

In most cases, it’s better to avoid “high risk AI systems” (as coined by the EU AI Act) that process sensitive PHI and handle complex clinical decisions, such as diagnoses and patient care plans. These AI use cases require extensive regulatory oversight, governance, and human review.

Instead, harness HIPAA and NHS compliant AI for administrative and non-clinical use cases. These are areas where you can improve staff experiences and glean ROI — just without as much risk.

The case for non-clinical healthcare AI

Burnt out teams, conflicting priorities, miscommunications, endless piles of administrative paperwork to sift through… Sound familiar?

This is the reality for many healthcare organizations far and wide. And it’s having a detrimental impact on staff morale.

In the USA, a third of healthcare administrators are considering leaving the industry. This is down to a mixture of workplace burnout, poor work/life balance, and excessive bureaucracy.

Overseas in the UK, 31% of workers feel burnt out because of their job, and 37% claim their work frustrates them.

This chronic burnout won’t cure itself. Healthcare organizations must diagnose the root problems and prescribe effective treatment. And this is exactly where AI can come to the rescue.

1. Reduce administrative burdens

Almost 70% of healthcare professionals say administrative work interferes with their ability to deliver patient support. From authorizing insurance claims to coordinating patient care, manual processes eat up a significant portion of time.

Secure AI chatbots and search functionality can win this time back. When used effectively, they speed-up knowledge discovery, reduce cross-department bottlenecks, and provide clear summaries of patient charts and care plans.

Other tools, such as “ambient” AI can scribe patient notes during appointments and check-ups. This enables a more personal, face-to-face experience for patients and doctors alike.

2. Streamline training and onboarding

New hires will naturally take time to learn your organization’s policies and SOPs. During this period, they may require additional support or clarification.

Here, AI can act as a secure, well-trained tutor.

AI assistants that index your content-rich digital workplace can provide newly hired nurses, care workers, and administrative staff with succinct answers and overviews to their questions. Thus, helping them get to grips with your services and stay compliant.

TIP: to ensure the AI’s answers are continuously relevant, enforce strict content review cycles across your manuals, policies, and knowledge base articles.

3. Self-service platform support

Some AI tools index vendor-provided support articles, platform tips and tricks, and troubleshooting guides.

Take Claromentis as an example. Customers have the option to connect the native AI assistant to our comprehensive customer support portal, Discover.

Employees can ask the assistant Claromentis-related questions on the go and receive quick, accurate answers. The result? Healthcare workers can resolve tech queries in minutes, completely independently. No bottlenecks, no endless IT support requests, no day-long hunt for answers.

The golden rule of healthcare AI

While it’s possible to enter PHI into AI systems for clinical decision making and predictive analyses, this requires careful oversight and — in most cases — direct patient and senior leadership authorization. Particularly if this data is then used for wider training purposes.

Unless you have the IT and security resources to hand, avoid using enterprise digital workplace AI for these highly sensitive use cases.

Keep it focused on empowering the staff, not directly treating the patient.

Where HIPAA and the NHS stand on healthcare AI

Both HIPAA and the NHS approve of the safe usage of AI in healthcare settings. (In fact, it’s a key part of the UK government’s 10-year NHS plan.)

But, as it stands, they have yet to create any specific AI regulations.

Therefore, organizations must do their due diligence and adapt existing frameworks, such as HIPAA and the NHS DSPT, to guide their AI usage.

From the information these regulatory bodies have provided, these are the most important AI security steps to remember:

5-steps to ensure safe and compliant AI deployment

1. Develop clear AI policies and procedures

If you deploy your AI tools without first building a robust foundation, they’ll crumble within a month or two.

Before accelerating your adoption:

• Adjust your existing governance frameworks to include using PHI in AI
• Create AI Code of Conduct documents and acceptable use policies, explaining accepted and prohibited AI tools and use cases
• Assign owners to your AI tools and systems, and enforce regular monitoring and oversight
• Conduct risk assessments to pinpoint potential security or data privacy issues, as well as any impact to your patients or service users

For regulatory purposes, you must distribute the policies to every staff member and, if possible, ascertain their acknowledgement via read-accept workflows.

1. Centralize content and ring-fence your AI

The power of AI lies in its ability to crawl, understand, and disseminate vast amounts of data. You might also consider this its downfall. After all, commercially available AI, such as ChatGPT and Google’s AI Mode, often cite incorrect information. In a healthcare setting, this is unacceptable.

To get the best results out of AI, train it on your approved content. And ring-fence your tools so they never index external information.

Ensure all of your SOPs, policies, communications, profiles, and training materials are digitized, version-controlled, and stored in a single digital workplace. The more information you can provide, the more knowledgeable and accurate your AI search and assistants will be, leading to more confident patient outcomes.

Needless to say, you must enforce regular content reviews to keep this knowledge up to date. Assign owners to policies, set stringent “update” deadlines, and schedule notifications whenever actions are required.

3. Implement strict role-based access

Only users with the correct clearance should be able to access PHI data. Which is why it’s important to ensure any AI tool inherits your strict role-based permissions.

When an administrator searches for a patient’s mobile number or insurance details on your digital workplace system, the AI search overview should not disclose information about their clinical lab results (or any other sensitive information).

4. Keep detailed records and audit logs

Every AI tool must capture an automated, timestamped audit trail.

This acts as irrefutable evidence of HIPAA/NHS DSPT compliance (or non-compliance), and can help you back-up any internal or patient-facing decisions that AI may have influenced.

5. Keep humans in the loop

As the NHS rightly puts it, “any final decision about the care that people receive should be made in consultation with the patient or service user, using your professional judgement”.

If AI influences any care-related decision, healthcare professionals must cross-check the decision, use their best judgement, and discuss it with the patient/s it affects.

6. Conduct AI-related security training

In keeping with your local healthcare regulations and data protection laws, create, deliver, and certify training across your workforce.

To simplify distribution and tracking, use a learning management system. Ideally, this should integrate with your existing policies, communications, and compliance processes.

How Claromentis 11 streamlines and secures healthcare operations

While AI gives healthcare professionals more room to breathe, many worry about the potential risks. The majority of NHS GPs — including those who do and do not use AI — name “lack of regulatory oversight”, “risk of clinical errors or misdiagnosis”, and “patient privacy” as their top concerns.

This, coupled with the industry’s long track record of breaches and cyberattacks, make AI a risky investment — no matter how promising the efficiency gains may be.

Fortunately, there are ways to mitigate this risk.

Reinforcing your governance framework, training your employees, and being selective about AI use cases is a necessary starting point. But to ensure complete regulatory compliance and PHI protection, you must also choose the right AI vendor.

With Claromentis 11, you benefit from a secure, regulatory-ready digital workplace with AI built in. Our intelligent AI search, chatbot, and site-wide assistants:

• Only index content on your platform (including policies, training, communications, user profiles, processes, and more)
• Obey your strict roles and permissions
• Cite source material in responses and overviews
• Curate a transparent, timestamped audit log to enhance oversight and streamline audits
• Can be turned off at any time

We also support completely flexible platform deployments, too, giving you greater control over your PHI.

To learn more about our comprehensive digital workplace for healthcare organizations, book a no-obligation discussion call with one of our experts.

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