Programs

Before adopting AI, it helps to understand how it will impact your organization and its employees. We recommend a series of five 30-minute workshops for employees to build a shared understanding of what is needed for successful AI implementation.  

Designed specifically for public health departments, the workshops cover topics such as how AI works, the importance of an AI governance policy, building an AI culture, how a data governance and security policy will help protect organizational data, AI worker fatigue, and strategies to minimize AI’s environmental impact. 

PHF brings extensive experience working with public health departments and understands the operational, governance, and workforce challenges agencies face when adopting AI. These workshops are tailored to the public health environment and focus on practical strategies for successful AI implementation. 

One of the most common mistakes organizations make is assuming they need an AI product before clearly defining the business problem they are trying to solve. This often leads teams to search for places to apply AI instead of identifying operational challenges where AI can create measurable value.  

PHF serves as a strategic partner to public health agencies preparing to experiment with or adopt AI. This service helps organizations: 

• Assess where they are on the AI Road Map 
• Develop an AI deployment strategy  
• Build an AI implementation team 
• Identify organizational readiness gaps  
• Understand IT requirements 
• Establish necessary policies and procedures, and safeguard their data 
• Build the operational foundation needed to support successful AI implementation 

When deploying AI, what often breaks first is not the model itself, but everything around the model that is needed to support it. PHF helps organizations identify and strengthen these critical elements before implementation begins. 

AI is advancing rapidly, far faster than previous transformations. This velocity of change poses unique security challenges as quick deployment often outpaces thorough risk assessment and control implementation. Consequently, security risks can become an afterthought.

As a strategic partner, PHF helps organizations develop and implement a robust AI governance framework and supporting data strategy that enables responsible AI adoption. AI governance must be actively deployed, monitored, and updated.

Key areas addressed through this service include:

• Visibility: Track and visualize AI applications across the entire IT landscape.
• Integration: Safely embed AI capabilities into existing systems and processes.
• Accountability: Ensure AI models are used responsibly and for their intended purpose.
• Data Stewardship: Establish comprehensive data governance to augment the AI policy.
• Responsibility: Define who is responsible when something goes wrong.
• Lifecycle Management: Oversee all active AI models, processes, and deployments.
• Compliance: Implement ethical and regulatory guardrails to meet legal standards.

As part of this service, PHF uses its Five Stages of AI Governance Maturity model to help an organization assess its current level of AI governance readiness. PHF then provides targeted guidance, transition strategies, and curated resources to help an organization determine its starting point and advance systematically to the next level.

PHF also helps organizations develop secure data sharing practices between internal and external partners while improving data accessibility, performance, and organizational resilience.

Introducing AI into an organization requires strong leadership. PHF helps leaders understand their role in creating a positive AI culture, supporting employees through change, and developing a robust infrastructure needed for successful AI implementation.

PHF’s approach includes:

• Conducting a baseline assessment of the six key elements of an AI adoptive culture and identifying gaps that need to be closed.
• Developing a clear and concise message about AI for the organization.
• Building an AI-ready organizational culture that promotes trust, continuous learning, innovation, and responsible AI use.
• Blending technology with a people-first approach, where AI serves as an enabler rather than a replacement.
• Identifying and responding to employee resistance, fear, and barriers to empowerment. Developing an AI usage policy and steps for action planning.
• Introducing AI into the organization through effective communication forums.

AI has the potential to be transformational for organizations, but it must be implemented thoughtfully. While AI can bring significant benefits, it may also disrupt existing workflows and organizational culture, which can lead to many challenges.

To minimize disruption that may occur when AI is introduced, PHF facilitates a process using the Modular kaizen model. This process helps identify potential points of disruption, assess their severity and urgency, determine who and what might be affected, and estimate the likely timeline of disruption.

Once the initial disruptions are understood, PHF works with organizations to charter a team, prioritize improvement opportunities, and execute a full improvement cycle using the PDCA (Plan-Do-Check-Act) model.

PHF helps organizations integrate AI into their Quality Improvement (QI) and Performance Management (PM) efforts to enhance problem-solving, planning, and decision-making. PHF works with agencies to identify opportunities where AI can support QI and PM activities, strengthen improvement processes, and increase organizational effectiveness.

Drawing on insights from PHF’s paper, AI Can Be a Useful Quality Improvement Team Member, this service helps organizations use AI as a practical tool to support improvement efforts, action planning, identify performance trends, and improve team productivity.