Five Horizons CTO on Thoughtful Adoption of AI in Healthcare IT

September 30th, 2026 | Jason Lopez | 6:42

Healthcare IT veteran Benjamin Urquhart says AI can transform patient care, but only if it fits clinician workflows and tames shadow AI before it scales.

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Video transcript:

Benjamin Urquhart: AI, if done and implemented correctly, and I believe the healthcare environment, it has to be done thoughtfully. It can be amazing. It can be. I don’t want to get on the hype train and go, “It’s going to solve everything,” because we’ve had those solutions in the past. It’s going to solve everything and it never does. It might come close, but it’s going to miss some pieces that we just don’t realize. And AI has rapidly evolved and it’s been adopted at such a rate that in the 18 years I’ve been in the industry, I don’t think I’ve seen anything like it. In a sense, it’s scary. Because of that in healthcare, all the regulational pieces we have and understanding how our client data is kept, where it’s kept, what can access it, east-west traffic right inside with an AI agent can be extremely scary, very vulnerable in that aspect.

And so when we’re looking at it from AI and healthcare, in my mind, the biggest thing becomes doing it thoughtfully and then doing it in a way that works within the end user’s workflow already. We give them all these things all the time. We tool them to death, right? I’m sure you’ve heard that phrase. And tools and solutions are not always the way to do it. You can look at their best thing about AI and healthcare, I think we can get rid of a lot of the administrative burden. We can utilize it within their workflows to remove some charting capabilities, do the reporting, take care of these things, but then at the same time, also use it to help analyze that data that’s coming into these EMRs and everything like that to where, because it is complex data. Health data is much more complex than I think everyone doesn’t always understand.

But we can use AI to better analyze that, giving us better outcomes at the end of the day for our patient care. Because if we’re using it in a thoughtful manner to go, we’re going to remove some administrative burden and we’re also going to utilize AI to help assist you diagnose a client or work through in determination, well, that provider themselves now has a better understanding of what’s going on. They’re able to spend more time with the client, which gives us the outcome we want and that is helping people. That’s the way I view AI in our world right now in healthcare. It’s got to be done in their workflow. It has to be done very thoughfully.

Ken Kaplan: With the foundation that you’ve built and are growing, you could take on new capabilities.

Benjamin Urquhart: Yeah. Anytime companies grow or you have to evolve, it’s always kind of a mental check aspect and you kind of go, “Are we really going all the way in? Are we only going halfway in?” But being afraid of the technology as it’s evolved, if you are, we might want to look elsewhere. And I don’t mean to be mean or so blunt about that, but because tech, my dad, I’ve grown up around tech. My dad was a mainframe programmer in the banking industry when I was a kid. Going to the Saster test at midnight when I was like seven or eight, no idea what’s going on.

And now it’s great. The tech has evolved my entire life and everything. One of the things though too, people have evolved and our end users today, they grew up with smartphones. We maybe didn’t, but they did. And so they, for an end user and a lot of this younger generation I feel that are coming in, we need to change maybe how we communicate with them a little bit. It’s not just a technical solution to them. We need to prove that in value to their life because that’s the tech that they’ve had their whole life. It added a value. Our legacy work environment does not really add a value. We add burden, just the way that systems are designed. So adjusting that and making them work within that is an evolutional piece I think from just being in tech in general. We just have to kind of adapt how we’re explaining, how we’re talking and communicating more so than just about anything else.

Ken Kaplan: How comfortable are you and your team to say, “This is the year that we’re going to do these three things with AI.” How do you feel you’re able to move into the future?

Benjamin Urquhart: I feel cautious about it. It’s one of the things that I know we’re going to have to do. Every company is doing it. We have shadow AI now. They were talking about that, one of the keynotes today. And in the past we had shadow IT where people were just. Now we have agents where they’re going out and they’re, “Oh, hey, because we didn’t have something maybe locked down.” Well, now there’s this agent that no one knows about. So I think when we look at having to do AI, we’re going to have to do it. I think it’s the way of the world. I think if, like we said earlier, thoughtfully done, it can make massive improvements. But at the same time, we need to ensure that’s structured correctly for being in your industry, whether it’s healthcare, manufacturing, whatever, you structure it right before you just say, “Hey, we’re doing all of this.” Standardization.

You might have someone who goes, “I really like Claude. I’ve got someone over here, ChatGPT, someone who says they don’t like Copilot, but maybe Copilot’s part of your 365 ecosystem. Why would you come over here unless there’s an obvious reason to do so?” So right now it’s really more around trying to figure out in a strategic aspect, look at where we are, look at what fits our ecosphere within our organization and making those decisions on how to move forward and where to implement first.

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