When generative AI arrived in 2022, healthcare saw a chance to work faster, analyze data and improve care. For Benjamin Urquhart, the real test is adopting it strategically.
The technology's prospects were especially exciting for healthcare, which is extending its use of AI at more than twice the rate of the broader U.S. economy. That's fitting, because hospitals and healthcare organizations have a mission to help people live longer, better lives.
As chief technology officer at Five Horizons Health Services, Urquhart has seen firsthand where healthcare AI brings value, from removing administrative redundancies and analyzing data to helping providers with diagnoses and treatment plans.
"That provider now has a better understanding of what's going on," Urquhart told The Forecast during an interview at the April 2026 .NEXT event in Chicago. "They're able to spend more time with the client, which gives us the outcome we want, and that is helping people."
How is the Five Horizons IT Team Enabling AI at Five Horizons?
From its origins as a focused HIV outreach agency in 1988, Five Horizons Health Services has grown into a regional healthcare pillar, expanding its mission to provide comprehensive, patient-centered support across Alabama and Mississippi. Urquhart joined a nonprofit community-based Five Horizons after his organization was acquired in 2022. He remembered how that transition happened without interrupting care for its clients. That put his team in a unique position to build for the future.
"We had already started building out the infrastructure at that organization, so when Five Horizons acquired the assets, we weren't starting from zero," he said. "We were able to carry that work forward while maintaining continuity of care for the clients we served. It was almost like instead of starting over, we're halfway there."
Despite the head start, Five Horizons did not yet have a standardized server infrastructure in place. That made Nutanix an intriguing option, he said, but because Five Horizons is a nonprofit, implementing new technology is easier said than done.
"We're a specialty healthcare provider, so we have limitations on how we can spend our resources. We can't really go, 'Let's go throw it in the cloud. Let's do this. Let's do that,'" Urquhart said. "We had to really look at it strategically and ask, what problem are we solving, what value does the investment return and is it sustainable for the organization?"
After opening four new facilities across Mississippi and Alabama over 18 months, Five Horizons is now implementing Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure, a hyperconverged infrastructure that helps it standardize and deliver applications and data across any cloud, regardless of its footprint.
Urquhart's team runs more than 50 virtual machines across various internal resources, spanning day-to-day activities and research environments. With a smaller team, Five Horizons can grow and scale while securing data and staying aware of how it lives in the organization's ecosystem.
"We have a very lean team that has to support not just our Nutanix environment, but our backup environment and everything else on top of it," Urquhart said. "Nutanix has significantly reduced the friction of routine infrastructure tasks; provisioning a new VM [virtual machine] can now be completed in roughly 15 minutes."
What Comes Next for Healthcare AI, and What Challenges Arise?
Five Horizons is expanding into virtual desktop infrastructure and containerization, even as shadow AI and data protection concerns complicate the path. The organization is planning to expand its healthcare AI applications beyond current uses. Urquhart is exploring virtual desktop infrastructure to provide more secure, consistent access while supporting the organization's security and compliance requirements. Containerization is another area with room for growth, allowing organizations to spin up more applications and better allocate hardware, storage and compute resources.
"We build for today and tomorrow, for where we're going," Urquhart said. "The goal is to establish a strong foundation that can evolve with the organization, so new capabilities become natural extensions of the architecture rather than one-off additions."
Though technology is making life easier in many aspects, it's also introducing new challenges. One is shadow AI, whose use is increasing as employees tinker on their own with tools like Claude or ChatGPT, or develop more elaborate custom builds. Protecting client data when AI agents have access to it is another. And then there's the hype train: Healthcare AI spending hit $1.4 trillion in 2025, tripling the prior year's investment.
Urquhart thinks AI can improve how teams handle many problems, but it can't solve everything. He encourages a sound implementation strategy, no matter the industry.
How Should Organizations Approach AI Thoughtfully?
Urquhart stresses fitting AI into end-user workflows rather than tooling problems to death, and securing organizational commitment before implementing change. With nearly two decades in the industry, Urquhart said he's never seen anything like the rapid evolution and adoption of AI. While rapid growth and east-west traffic via AI agents can introduce new security and governance concerns, particularly with sensitive client data and complex regulations, he believes the technology is a valuable tool when implemented correctly.
"I think AI can remove a significant amount of administrative burden," Urquhart said. "We can utilize it within workflows to reduce some of the charting burden, streamline reporting and automate routine administrative tasks. We can also use it to help analyze increasingly complex data within our EMRs and surface useful information more efficiently, giving providers better information to support patient care."
However, Urquhart stressed the importance of being thoughtful in bringing on AI and other technical helpers. Rather than trying to "tool them to death," IT leaders in healthcare should look at how a tool fits into the end user's workflow and structure its implementation accordingly.
Urquhart is cautiously optimistic about what the future holds. Because his dad was a mainframe programmer for the banking industry, he grew up around technology. He would sometimes tag along on his dad's work, enjoying the experience despite having "no idea what was going on." Since then, he's appreciated watching technology grow and improve.
People have evolved as much as technology, Urquhart observed. For example, today's generation has grown up with smartphones. That changes how organizations must speak to them as customers and collaborate with them as colleagues.
"It's not just a technical solution to them," Urquhart said. "For people who have grown up surrounded by technology, simply calling something a technical improvement isn't enough. We have to demonstrate how it creates value in their work or their lives, and that means adapting how we communicate and how we introduce change."
That communication involves committing to and aligning on organizational decisions, Urquhart said.
"Meaningful change requires organizational commitment," he said. "At some point, you have to ask whether everyone is truly aligned around the direction and prepared to follow through, or whether you're only implementing the change halfway."
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Joey Held is a writer, podcaster and author based in Austin, Texas, and the founder of Fun Fact Friyay and Wacky Travel. Connect with him on LinkedIn or BlueSky.
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