Service · Healthcare AI Readiness
Healthcare AI Readiness is a two-week, healthcare-specific assessment that produces a defensible HIPAA-aligned plan for AI in your hospital. We audit your AI governance against HIPAA technical and administrative safeguards, map clinical and operational use cases that fit your environment, and deliver a 90-day roadmap that small IT teams and compliance officers can actually execute against.
For eligible hospitals, this engagement aligns to the Microsoft Rural Hospital Resiliency Program.
The problem this engagement solves
Rural hospitals and community healthcare systems are being squeezed from both sides on AI right now.
From above: the board reads about clinical AI, the compliance officer is being asked by the auditor about AI in the EHR, and the funder or system partner expects a policy. From below: nurses and staff are already using ChatGPT and consumer AI tools on phones and personal accounts, to summarize patient notes, draft letters, look up clinical guidelines. The PHI exposure is happening whether you know about it or not.
When clinical staff turn to consumer AI tools to lighten the workload, PHI can move out of the controlled environment quickly. The fix is not a memo: it is a sanctioned, governed alternative that does the job better. And it needs the governance baseline in place from day one.
Add the small IT team problem: most rural hospitals run with a 1 to 4 person IT department that was not hired to write an AI governance program. There is no compliance bandwidth to build a defensible HIPAA-aligned plan from scratch, and outside healthcare-AI consultants quote six-figure assessments.
Healthcare AI Readiness fills the gap. Two weeks. $7,500. A written, defensible HIPAA-aligned AI plan you can take to your compliance committee, your board, your insurance carrier, and the surveyor.
What you get
Not a slide deck. Written in the format your compliance committee and board expect, yours regardless of what you do next.
Deliverable 01
A scorecard of your current AI exposure against HIPAA technical safeguards (encryption, access control, audit logging), administrative safeguards (workforce training, BAA inventory, sanction policy), and the new HHS guidance on AI in healthcare.
Includes a documented shadow-AI exposure assessment: what staff are actually using, which tools are touching PHI, and which need to be shut down or replaced with a sanctioned alternative.
Deliverable 02
The three to five highest-impact AI use cases for your hospital, scored by clinical risk, operational lift, and HIPAA defensibility. Typical candidates: clinical documentation support, prior-authorization drafting, scheduling optimization, revenue-cycle coding support, patient-facing intake, board and quality reporting.
Each use case has a named clinical or operational owner, a required HIPAA control set, and a documented PHI-handling pattern.
Deliverable 03
A written plan to move from where you are to first sanctioned AI deployment in 90 days. Identifies which Microsoft 365 / Copilot configuration tier is required, what BAA coverage you need, what training to deploy to clinical and administrative staff, and what audit-logging posture surveyors will look for.
Mapped to a CompleteCare tier so the implementation path is concrete.
How it works
Week 1 · Healthcare-specific discovery
Week 2 · Healthcare-specific roadmap
What happens after
The most common next steps for rural hospitals, depending on what the assessment surfaces.
Every path leads to a CompleteCare tier configured for healthcare. The assessment tells you which one.
Pricing
$7,500 flat
Banded for the typical rural-hospital and community-healthcare environment: 50 to 500 users, single EHR, 1 to 4 person IT team. Larger systems (multi-hospital networks, 500 or more users, multi-tenant) scope to $10,000.
No 12-month commitment. The assessment is a one-time engagement; the roadmap is yours regardless of what you do next.
For qualifying critical access hospitals and federally-designated rural health programs, sponsored pricing is available. Ask on the scoping call.
For eligible critical access hospitals and rural health programs, this engagement aligns to the Microsoft Rural Hospital Resiliency Program. See the broader context for rural hospitals, including Dragon Copilot positioning and the Rural Hospital Resiliency link, on the Rural Hospitals industry page.
Questions
The methodology is similar; the lens is healthcare-specific. Healthcare AI Readiness audits against HIPAA technical and administrative safeguards specifically, scores use cases for clinical risk, includes a BAA gap analysis, and writes the roadmap in the format compliance committees and surveyors expect. The Discovery Sprint is right for nonprofits and foundations; Healthcare AI Readiness is right for hospitals.
We do not need PHI to complete the assessment. The tenant review looks at configuration and audit posture, not patient data. We have a BAA available if it becomes useful (for example, if you want us to review actual audit logs); the BAA is at no charge.
Yes. Microsoft 365 Copilot is covered under the Microsoft HIPAA BAA when properly configured, including Copilot Studio agents. The assessment identifies the specific configuration steps your tenant needs and whether your current state meets them. Most rural hospitals require 4 to 8 weeks of configuration work before Copilot can be safely turned on; the roadmap lays that work out.
Partially. The assessment focuses on AI on the Microsoft platform (Copilot, Copilot Studio agents, Power Platform AI, Azure AI Foundry) because that is what we manage. If your EHR vendor (Epic, Cerner/Oracle Health, Meditech, athenahealth) has clinical AI features turned on, we surface them in the audit and identify the governance gap, but the remediation may belong to the EHR vendor, not to us. The roadmap is candid about this boundary.
Microsoft 365 Copilot and Copilot Studio are covered under the Microsoft Business Associate Agreement when deployed in compliant tenant configurations. The assessment includes a documented review of your current BAA inventory (Microsoft, EHR vendor, and any third-party AI tools) and identifies gaps.
Yes. The shadow-AI scan is one of the most consistently surprising parts of the assessment. We look at endpoint usage data, browser patterns, and staff self-reporting to surface what is actually being used. For most rural hospitals, the exposure is larger than leadership thought, and the remediation is straightforward once it is documented.
Yes. The deliverables are written in a format auditors and surveyors recognize, with explicit mapping to HIPAA Security Rule citations. Several rural hospitals have shared the documentation directly with carriers and surveyors as evidence of a defensible program.
A senior engagement lead supported by a Microsoft-certified solutions architect and a healthcare-experienced governance consultant. A member of the leadership team is the executive contact throughout the engagement.
Microsoft alignment
Healthcare AI Readiness is built on the same Microsoft stack we use across the practice, with the compliance posture matched to the HIPAA regulatory environment.
Two weeks. A defensible HIPAA-aligned AI plan. Written in the format your compliance committee, your board, and your surveyor expect.
Tell us about your hospital, your current Microsoft 365 posture, and what is driving the AI conversation right now. We confirm scope on a 30-minute call.
Not sure if this is the right fit? Start with a Discovery Sprint → The general AI readiness assessment for nonprofits and foundations.
A senior member of our team will reach out within one business day to confirm scope and schedule the scoping call.