AI guiding principles at Ochsner Health

We use AI with the goal of making your care better. 

What this means for you: 

• We choose AI tools that improve your care, so your treatment is supported by the most advanced technology available.
• For example, AI can help your care team respond faster to urgent conditions like stroke, or catch subtle, early warning signs that may indicate the need for a change in your treatment plan.

We tell you how we use AI, and we protect your personal information.

What this means for you: 

• We aim to let you know when AI plays a direct role in your care. For example, your physician or care team member will ask your permission before using an AI tool to record your visit and capture notes.
• Your health information is protected by strict privacy and security rules, including HIPAA.
• We expect the companies with whom we partner to follow these same high standards of information and privacy protection.

Technology should support, not get in the way of, human connection.

What this means for you: 

• Your care team is always responsible for your care, even when AI is used to support their work.  
• When AI handles routine paperwork and tasks, your care team can spend more time with you and focus on listening and caring for you. When you speak with an AI agent, it will identify itself as AI and talk in a way that's warm, respectful and easy to understand.

Every patient deserves fair and respectful care — no exceptions.

What this means for you: 

• We consider fairness and bias when we choose AI tools and partners.
• We use AI in ways that help us reach more people and close gaps in care for our communities.

We bring AI into care with the same commitment to excellence, quality and innovation that guides everything we do at Ochsner.

What this means for you: 

• We only use AI tools that meet our high standards for safety, fairness and quality.
• We have team members dedicated to optimizing AI work—adapting tools to fit our patients and our systems, checking quality at every step, and expanding what works across our system.

We want to shape the future of AI in healthcare together.

What this means for you: 

• We work with patients to improve new AI tools as we adopt them.
• We welcome your questions and concerns. You can share them anytime with our patient and clinician advocacy teams. 

We will keep listening, learning and improving as the field of AI evolves — because at Ochsner, our patients, our teams and our communities will always be our purpose and our priority.

The heart of our work is people — our patients and each other — and we never want technology to get in the way of that.

What this means for you: 

• We use AI to support your expertise, judgment, compassionate care and relationships. You remain responsible for the work you do and the decisions you make.
• We use AI to ease your workload, so you have more time for relationships, decisions and moments that need human judgment and care. 

We are open about how AI is used in your work, and we protect your privacy.

What this means for you: 

• When AI is part of your workflow, we will be transparent about its purpose and intended use.
• Data about your work is used only for clear, defined purposes and always with appropriate oversight.
• Information collected through AI tools is protected by the same safeguards we use for all team member information: confidentiality policies, information security safeguards and applicable privacy laws. See our Third Party Standards of Conduct and Release of Employment Information policies for more information.  

We bring AI into our workplace with the same commitment to safety, quality and innovation that guides everything we do.

What this means for you:

• We only adopt AI tools that meet our rigorous standards.
• Before an AI tool becomes part of your workflow, dedicated teams review and test it to make sure it fits how we work at Ochsner; supports safe, reliable and high-quality care; and meets the standards we expect. 
• We will support you in upskilling and developing expertise in new tools as they evolve. 

Every team member deserves to be supported fairly and equitably by the tools we use.  

What this means for you:  

• We weigh fairness and potential bias when we choose AI tools and partners.
• We offer training and resources so everyone — whatever your role, experience or comfort with technology — can use these tools with confidence. 

We want to work with you to shape how AI is used at Ochsner.

What this means for you:

• We welcome your feedback, questions and concerns. Share them anytime through a Help Center in Workday ticket or the Compliance hotline (888-273-8442 or ochsnercomplianceline.com, which enables anonymous feedback).
• At Ochsner you are always empowered to ask “why,” when you need more explanation about our use of AI tools. We will take the time to pause and review with you. 
• We rely on your feedback to optimize how AI works at Ochsner. AI is only as good as the training it’s given, so we encourage you to use feedback features if any AI tool is not functioning as expected. Your input is already influencing the tools we use. When Epic adds a new AI feature, for example, a group of users tests and shapes it before we introduce it to everyone.