Three questions every CFO should ask any AI vendor.
Healthcare AI vendor evaluation has become a complex multi-month project at most organizations. Most of that complexity is unnecessary. Three questions, asked early and answered concretely, will tell you whether to continue evaluating a vendor or move on.
Question 1: What specifically will you put in writing about outcomes?
The first question separates serious vendors from demo-quality ones. Serious AI vendors will commit to specific outcomes in writing: denial rate reduction, days-to-cash compression, cost per claim improvement, RAF lift, or whatever metric matters most for your use case. They will agree to baseline measurement methodology, audit cadence, and contractual remedies if outcomes are not met. Vendors who hedge on this question are not ready to take operational responsibility for the outcome. Move on.
Question 2: Show me the audit log of one AI decision in a HIPAA-compliant environment, end to end.
The second question separates vendors who treat compliance as a sales talking point from vendors who built it into their architecture. Ask to see a complete audit log of one AI decision: the input data hash, the model version, the inference output, the confidence score, the downstream action triggered, and the human review record. If the vendor cannot show this in five minutes, the audit logging is incomplete or the architecture is not HIPAA-ready. Move on.
Question 3: Who is the named senior partner on our account, and what is their accountability?
The third question separates AI platforms from AI service partnerships. Most AI vendor relationships fail in operations, not in initial deployment. A named senior partner on your account, with written accountability for outcomes, is the difference between a software vendor who hands you a license and steps aside, and a partner who stays in the foxhole with you when things get hard. Ask. If the answer is a support queue, you are buying software, not a partnership.