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Theresa McDonnell is the chief nurse executive and senior vice president of Duke University Health System.

Before becoming chief nurse executive of the Duke University Health System, Theresa McDonnell ran a bakery and cared for loved ones with serious health conditions. She says it’s important to recognize lived experience.

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Get perspectives from clinical leaders and neuroscience experts about the underlying causes and consequences of these gaps, practical opportunities to address them, and a proven roadmap that shows how leading health systems have successfully transformed their dementia screening and care processes.

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Artificial intelligence is playing a bigger role in cybersecurity, and hospitals and healthcare organizations are using AI tools to improve their defenses.

Limor Kessem, IBM Consulting’s global lead for cyber crisis management, says the growing use of AI in their cybersecurity strategy 

is helping healthcare organizations reduce the expense and disruption of breaches

. The average cost of a healthcare data breach over the past year was $7.4 million, still the highest of any industry, but down from $9.7 million, according to 

IBM’s new annual report on the cost of breaches

Kessem says the use of AI is “paying dividends.”

“That's just containing and detecting and doing stuff a lot faster than the organizations would, and the more you cut the time to do things, the more money you save,” she tells Chief Healthcare Executive®.

But ransomware groups are also employing AI technologies in their efforts to infiltrate organizations, and they are having success as well.

“AI is doing good things for everyone,” she says. “It's doing good things for the security teams. It's for organizations, for people's productivity, and for everyone. It also includes the attackers who are able to build better phishing very quickly.” 

(See part of our conversation on AI and cybersecurity in this video. The story continues below.)

Limor Kessem of IBM talks about how AI is being used for good and bad purpsoes

AI and cybersecurity: Hospitals see promise, but attackers have new tools

These are the biggest health data breaches in the first half of 2025

In the past, it was easier to detect suspicious emails, since some had five typos in the first two sentences. Such messages often contained awkward phrasing that made it clear the author’s first language wasn’t English. But with AI tools, ransomware groups are sending polished, authentic messages.

Kessem also notes that phishing was the top attack vector used to get into healthcare systems.

“It's a big deal, and it's just getting a lot harder to recognize a phishing attempt from attackers,” she says.

Beyond that, cyberattackers are using AI tools to write malware, making it easier and quicker for ransomware groups to try and hack into organizations.

“Attackers are doing better with AI,” Kessem says. “They're doing things faster, and it’s something we have to contend with.”

“They could write malware without knowing how to write malware,” she says. “Just get the code, make sure it works, and proceed. So they're doing things a lot faster. And especially, I think it is for people in the cyber crime arena who already know how to write code like that, it just speeds them up so much, just like it does everybody else that writes code.”

Kessem says the growing use of AI by both healthcare organizations and criminal groups is only going to continue.

“It's kind of like an AI against AI sort of situation right now, but I think it's inevitable,” Kessem says. “It's just like when we kind of went mainstream on the internet, and now, AI is at everybody's fingertips, and everybody's using it for everything.”

Kessem says she's worried about the prospect of attackers developing AI agents that will be inserted into organizations.

"I am afraid to see, them bringing a rogue agent into an organization and letting it loose, and connecting it to things, and letting it loose on the organization," she says. "That's what I'm scared of, and this is what I think organizations should be looking out for in the next couple of years."

More attackers are also developing more credible “deep fake” ploys, as they use AI to mimic the voices and faces of organization leaders.

“They'll do a really good deep fake, which is very scary, because that's totally eroding trust everywhere, and the concept of trust,” Kessem says.

While some deep fakes in the past were less convincing, Kessem says the technology is improving.

“It's becoming better and better,” she says. “A few years back, five years back, it was a little clunky. It started getting extremely good, extremely accurate, and it looks and feels right. And beyond just the voice cloning, there's also the images, the real time images, where it could look like the person.”

“So these are definitely things that are really shaking the foundations of trust of what we see in general, and of course, in terms of security,” she adds.

Healthcare leaders have been worried about the prospect of deep fakes. Lee Kim, senior principal for cybersecurity and privacy at HIMSS, said in a September 2023 interview with Chief Healthcare Executive® that 

she expects health systems will see more deepfakes

“Deepfakes, I predict, will make a significant entry point into healthcare as well as other industries,” Kim said in that interview.

Cyberattackers target physician practices, specialty groups

While AI tools can help companies detect attackers attempting to hack into systems, she says AI can only do so much to help a system recover from an attack. Healthcare organizations took 279 days, on average, to identify and contain breaches, more than five weeks longer than the worldwide average of all industries, according to the IBM report.

Once an attacker has hacked a system, if organizations have to take key systems such as electronic medical records offline, then staff are going to be facing a lot of manual work.

“Recovery from the disruption is still taking very long, and the times are not going down,” Kessem says. “You think, Well, can we use AI to do that? Can we, like, speed that up with AI? I mean, we're speeding all the other parts of the life cycle with AI.”

But she says, “Actually, it's not as easy, because the recovery, a lot of times, tends to be very physical.”

Kessem says healthcare organizations need to brace for more disruptive attacks powered by AI.

“I think AI is going to make cyber attacks larger,” she says.

Organizations must govern their own use of AI tools carefully, and Kessem says health systems need to bring AI staff into discussions about bolstering cybersecurity. Hospitals and health systems need detailed plans for maintaining operations if and when a breach occurs.

Health systems need “a playbook for disruption and should be planning ahead for everything,” Kessem says.

Why LLMs demand a rethink of healthcare AI governance | Viewpoint

More health systems are using AI tools to improve defenses, but ransomware groups are using it for phishing, writing malware, and deepfakes.

Topic

AI is improving cybersecurity in healthcare, but attackers are using it, too

Healthcare organizations are speaking out after they have been barred from working with a federal panel charged with making recommendations on vaccine policy.

The American Medical Association and several other groups have been told they won’t be working with the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices on vaccine recommendations.

The development comes several weeks after 

U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. fired 17 members of the committee

, a move which outraged many healthcare leaders. Critics also pointed out that Kennedy replaced the panel’s members with some who reflected 

his long-running skepticism and criticism of vaccines

The AMA, American Academy of Family Physicians, and Infectious Diseases Society of America are among several groups prohibited from working with the committee and reviewing data on vaccine recommendations.

 Friday condemning the decision to bar the organizations from working with the federal panel on vaccine policy. They urged President Trump’s administration to reconsider excluding the groups from working with the federal panel.

“We are deeply disappointed and alarmed that our organizations are being characterized as ‘biased’ and therefore barred from reviewing scientific data and informing the development of vaccine recommendations that have long helped ensure our nation’s vaccine program is safe, effective, and free from bias,” the groups said.

“For decades, liaisons from our organizations have reviewed published and unpublished data and literature related to vaccine efficacy, effectiveness, and safety and provided unbiased input for ACIP’s consideration,” the groups said. “To remove our deep medical expertise from this vital and once transparent process is irresponsible, dangerous to our nation’s health, and will further undermine public and clinician trust in vaccines.”

The American Academy of Family Physicians says it signed onto the AMA statement in opposition to the removal of medical society experts from the evidence review process. Family physician liaisons to the vaccine panel have not received formal notice of exclusion, the AAFP says.

 first reported that the AMA and other groups would be prohibited from working with the federal panel. 

 reported Friday that it had confirmed the news with a federal official, and cited an email expressing a desire to move away from groups with bias on their own constituents.

The statement of protest Friday was issued by the American Academy of Family Physicians

American Academy of Pediatrics; American College of Physicians; American Geriatrics Society; American Medical Association; American Osteopathic Association; Infectious Diseases Society of America; and the National Medical Association.

Healthcare organizations have grown increasingly dismayed by changes to federal health policy since 

Kennedy took over the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services

Public health has taken ‘a huge black eye’ with federal cuts

Kennedy said he ousted the members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices to restore public confidence in the panel and reduce conflicts of interests.

This week, the panel members spoke out against their ouster and the implications for public health. In an opinion piece for the 

 published Wednesday, the former members suggested the need for a credible and possibly independent panel to advise on vaccine policy.

"The abrupt dismantling of the rigorously vetted process and the replacement of the Committee with an inexperienced and biased panel has engendered fundamental distrust in the Committee's vital work," they wrote. "The nation now faces a scenario in which the rigor and discipline of these vaccine recommendation processes are rapidly eroding."

Dr. Georges C. Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association, told Chief Healthcare Executive 

 that he’s gravely concerned that Kennedy’s actions are undermining public confidence in vaccines, which is already lower than it should be. Benjamin pointed to Kennedy’s firing of all the members of the vaccine advisory panel as a disturbing sign.

“He got rid of a group of well-established experts with a lot of experience understanding vaccines, and he's recreated the panel with the degree of vaccine skeptics that have nowhere near the both academic or science experience of the previous panel,” Benjamin said last month.

The AMA and other health groups have also spoken out in recent days after reports that Kennedy is considering replacing all the members of the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force.

“We urge you to retain the previously appointed members of the USPSTF and commit to the long-standing process of regular meetings to ensure their important work can continue without interruption,” the 

CDC faces criticism for new research questioning link of vaccines and autism

Several healthcare organizations spoke out after they said they’re being excluded from advising a federal committee on vaccine recommendations.

Theresa McDonnell

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