Before you paste anything into ChatGPT, ask one question: would I be comfortable if this ended up outside my practice?
The Cybersecurity Awareness Month Question Every Practice Should Ask
Cybersecurity Awareness Month tends to focus on phishing emails and password hygiene, and those are worth reinforcing every October. But for specialty healthcare practices specifically, AI tools have quietly become a newer, less obvious data security question. Front desk staff, schedulers, and clinical teams are all reaching for AI to save time, often without a clear policy on what’s safe to type into it.
Keep These Out, Unless Your Tool Is Specifically Approved
Keep these out, unless your tool is specifically approved for them:
- Passwords and logins
- Patient records, names, contact details
- Employee personal information
- Banking or payment details
- Medical information
- Confidential contracts and proprietary information
Paid Doesn’t Automatically Mean Private
Consumer and business versions of AI tools can handle your data very differently. Paid doesn’t automatically mean private. A tool your practice pays for at the enterprise or business tier may have very different data retention and training policies than the free consumer version of the same product, and it’s worth knowing which one your team is actually using.
Try It This Week
- Ask your team which AI tools they’re currently using, free or paid versions
- Check the data retention and training settings on whichever ones come up
- If patient information has ever been typed into a consumer AI tool, that’s worth addressing directly, not ignoring
Not sure what’s safe to use with the tools your team already has? Book a free call with TST. This is exactly the kind of Cybersecurity Awareness Month conversation worth having with a partner who already knows healthcare data security, not figuring it out alone.
