The University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB Health) today announced the deployment of HIPAA-compliant, AI-powered web search for clinicians and staff, the first capability of its kind at enterprise scale in an academic health system. The deployment was enabled through The University of Texas System’s REAL Health AI initiative, with the intention to extend across all UT System health institutions, reaching more than 130,000 clinicians and staff.
“Bringing secure, real-time web access into HIPAA-compliant workflows keeps the information people need and the protections patients expect in the same place. This capability significantly strengthens the usefulness of AI-driven tools across clinical and operational settings,” said Peter McCaffrey, MD, MS, FCAP, chief digital and AI officer at UTMB Health and chair of UT REAL Health AI at UT System. “The UT REAL Health AI initiative gave us the framework and partnership to make it a reality at scale.”
Clinicians and staff routinely rely on current external information to support care delivery and operations, including the most recent clinical guidelines, FDA safety communications, payer policy changes, and public health advisories. Historically, much of this information has been accessed through consumer web browsers and tools, meaning clinicians and staff must step outside internal HIPAA-compliant systems to access external information. Within the new platform, users can search and synthesize external information without leaving their existing workflows.
Responses are grounded in source material, with citations and traceability to support review and verification. Enterprise controls, oversight, and governance standards remain intact throughout. This deployment builds on the secure, HIPAA-compliant AI chat capabilities already in place across the UT System health institutions through the UT REAL Health AI initiative, expanding those tools to include real-time external web information within the same governed environment.
“This is exactly the kind of capability the UT REAL Health AI initiative was designed to accelerate,” said Zain Kazmi, the UT System’s associate vice chancellor and chief analytics and digital officer of health affairs. “It exists to help health institutions move faster on AI in ways that are safe, governed, and clinically meaningful. UTMB has shown that HIPAA compliant web searches can work at enterprise scale, giving us the pathway to extend it across the UT health institutions so that clinicians and staff will soon no longer need to work across multiple platforms to find, verify, and act on information.”
The deployment is powered through a partnership with Qualified Health and Anthropic.