Healthcare AI as Critical Digital Health Infrastructure: A Public Health Preparedness Framework for Systemic Risk

Nikolay Lipskiy () and Stephen V. Flowerday
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Nikolay Lipskiy: Center for Applied Medical AI (CAMA), Atlanta, GA 30019, USA
Stephen V. Flowerday: School of Computer and Cyber Sciences, Augusta University, Augusta, GA 30912, USA

Future Internet, 2026, vol. 18, issue 5, 1-25

Abstract: Healthcare artificial intelligence (AI) is moving from the laboratory into the infrastructure of care. As these systems become embedded in imaging, electronic health records, triage, and clinical decision support, their failures can affect not only individual encounters but also institutions and patient populations. Yet governance still centers on model development, local validation, and one-time compliance, with limited attention to cross-site failure after deployment. This article examines how public health preparedness can help close that gap. It presents a conceptual analysis grounded in two cases: a pneumonia-screening convolutional neural network that learned institutional confounders rather than portable clinical signals, and a widely deployed sepsis prediction model whose external performance and alert burden fell short of developer claims. Together, these cases reveal five governance features of systemic healthcare AI risk: population-level exposure, cascade effects across shared infrastructures, unequal vulnerability, delayed recognition, and coordination needs beyond any single institution. In response, we propose a tripartite framework combining stronger pre-deployment assurance, post-deployment surveillance with escalation thresholds, and tertiary response through investigation, rollback, remediation, and cross-site learning. The argument is not that AI failures are epidemics, but that high-impact clinical AI systems now function as critical digital health infrastructure requiring preparedness alongside lifecycle oversight.

Keywords: health infrastructure; healthcare AI governance; systemic healthcare AI risk; collaborative surveillance; public health intelligence; public health; cyber–physical systems; algorithm vigilance; sociotechnical safety (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O3 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
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