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It’s hard to believe another HLTH Conference is in the books! While the conference might be over, the momentum, conversations, and healthcare innovation show no signs of slowing.
Every hall and session buzzed with conversations about AI-driven transformation, next-generation diagnostics, data interoperability, cloud security solutions for healthcare IT, and the boundless potential of digital health innovation.
As our team returns from another year at the event, we are energized by the industry’s progress and more focused on the foundation that makes it all possible: robust multi-cloud security and compliance.
HLTH 2025 at a Glance
A few of the many impactful discussions we listened to included Mark Cuban’s take on the rising costs of healthcare and the need for affordable prescription drugs, Kaiser Permanente CEO Greg Adams and Risant Health CEO’s plans to spread value-based care, and Jennifer Mensik Kennedy’s insights on the importance of keeping physicians healthy to deliver effective care.
While the spotlight often shines on groundbreaking technology, the unspoken requirement for every advancement is ironclad healthcare cybersecurity and compliance. For health tech innovators looking to scale, the path forward is paved with complex data, multicloud environments, and threats that are growing more robust with the use of artificial intelligence.
Our team reflected on their conversations and took away a few key themes. Let’s look at cloud security for healthcare, and opportunities that healthcare technology leaders need to know heading into 2026.
AI Governance and Healthcare Compliance
Discussions around artificial intelligence dominated the conference. Sessions like “The AI Agent Hot Seat” and “Healthcare AI: Real Data on Who’s Winning” made it clear that AI is a day to day technology that’s almost become a business requirement for healthcare and health tech startups.
The proliferation of AI agents, large language models (LLMs), and ambient clinical intelligence tools is creating and able to analyze unprecedented volumes of sensitive protected health information (PHI). For a growing health tech company, this AI boom makes navigating healthcare compliance, particularly HIPAA, more complex, especially as we are about to see major changes to the HIPAA security rule for the first time in decades.
The core challenge is not just the algorithm itself but the entire ecosystem it operates within. This is why a proactive and dedicated approach to AI governance is essential and that your AI strategy is built upon a compliant-by-design cloud foundation. It’s essential that, from day one, the infrastructure supporting your AI strategy and tools is secure, monitored, and audit ready.
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Understanding and Governing Shadow AI in Healthcare
Managed cloud compliance services provide this critical layer, allowing innovators to focus on development while ensuring their underlying framework meets rigorous regulatory standards.
HIPAA Compliance and Cloud Security
The growth of AI and the increasing complexity of compliance often create tension between innovation and speed to market. However, meeting compliance regulations in healthcare long predate the explosion of AI technologies. Many conversations we had at the conference, particularly with healthcare professionals, highlighted a common challenge: they want to innovate quickly, but lack the compliance expertise required to operate within this space.
For many startups and healthcare innovators, compliance is an afterthought, while they are laser-focused on hitting revenue goals, meeting board expectations, and accelerating product development timelines.
Healthcare compliance requirements, like HIPAA and HITRUST, can fall by the wayside until they become unavoidable. In fact, some founders voiced concerns that they’re not even sure if they’re meeting basic HIPAA requirements, let alone navigating any recent changes to the rule.
This lack of clarity can stall innovation and create significant risks, leaving innovators wondering where to begin, and stalling the implementation of a compliance strategy altogether.
Multicloud is the New Reality—And So is the Expanded Threat Landscape
A clear theme emerging from sessions like “The Tech Stack Intervention” was that the healthcare industry has fully embraced a multi-cloud strategy. Health systems, payers, and healthcare technology companies are leveraging a multi-cloud approach in situations where they never thought they would. Why are they leveraging multicloud?
A multi-cloud strategy allows organizations to leverage the unique strengths of different providers, such as Microsoft’s generative AI partnership with OpenAI or Google’s industry-specific models like MedPaLM. This approach not only prevents vendor lock-in, but also provides the flexibility and resilience needed for business continuity in case of an outage, like we saw with AWS this October.
Furthermore, it enables smarter AI deployment, allowing companies to A/B test and route tasks to the most efficient and cost-effective model, regardless of which cloud it resides on. This optimizes both performance and cost, ensuring the best tool is used for each specific job.
Operating across multiple clouds can create data silos and inconsistent security controls, expanding the attack surface for cybercriminals. A fragmented security posture makes it difficult to maintain visibility and control, turning a multi-cloud environment into a prime target.
Secure Your Multi-Cloud Innovations
The goal is to let your smartest people drive as fast as possible, focused entirely on the road ahead, while a robust and comprehensive multi-cloud security approach ensures a secure, compliant and resilient environment in which to operate.
This includes ensuring unified visibility across all workloads, enforcing consistent security controls to eliminate weak points, and automating compliance with regulations like HIPAA for handling sensitive patient data.
Additionally, leveraging cloud managed detection and response services can proactively identify and mitigate cyber threats, ensuring protection against risks like ransomware. With these measures in place, your team can focus on driving innovation safely and effectively.
Building Trust in Healthcare IT
From panels on patient advocacy to discussions on preventive health, a fundamental truth was echoed throughout HLTH 2025: patient trust is the most valuable currency in healthcare. For a health tech startup, a single data breach can be an extinction-level event, destroying credibility with patients, partners, and investors.
Sessions like “From Gray Areas to Red Flags: Hot Topics in Fraud & Abuse” highlighted the intense scrutiny on data handling and privacy. Demonstrating a serious commitment to data protection, is a powerful differentiator in a crowded market.
Partnering with a dedicated healthcare cybersecurity and compliance expert sends a clear signal that you prioritize the safety of patient data.
Healthcare Cybersecurity & Compliance Checklist
The path to scaling innovation in healthcare is exciting but filled with challenges. The conversations at HLTH 2025 confirmed that as technology accelerates, so does the need for a foundational security strategy.
Here is a short checklist for health tech leaders looking to scale securely in a multi-cloud environment:
- Audit Your Current Environment: Conduct a thorough audit of your current cloud infrastructure to identify and address any existing healthcare compliance gaps.
- Evaluate Your Threat Visibility: Can you confidently say you have complete visibility into potential threats across your entire tech stack, including all cloud environments?
- Establish Data and AI Governance Strategies: Before you scale your AI models and data operations, build a robust data governance framework to manage data securely and ethically. As our CISO and Founder, Chris Bowen recently said, “Begin with governance, and then scale with confidence.“
- Implement Cloud Managed Detection and Response: Leverage cloud MDR solutions to monitor, detect, and respond to threats in real time, ensuring your cloud environments remain secure as you scale.
- Strengthen Compliance Implementation: Ensure your systems, processes, and tools are aligned with healthcare regulations like HIPAA, HITRUST, GxP and GDPR, minimizing risk while maintaining trust with patients and stakeholders.
- Adopt FinOps and Cloud Cost Optimization Strategies: Build financial governance in the cloud by adopting FinOps to optimize cloud costs, track spending, and ensure scalability without unnecessary expenses.
Navigating the complexities of healthcare cybersecurity, AI threat detection, and multicloud healthcare compliance requires specialized expertise. As we look forward to future industry events, ClearDATA remains committed to empowering innovators to change healthcare for the better—safely and securely.
By focusing on these strategies, health tech leaders can scale their innovations securely and efficiently, laying the foundation for long-term success.
Ready to secure your healthcare innovation? Discover how ClearDATA’s managed cloud compliance and MDR solutions safeguard your multi-cloud environment.
