Mercyhealth Partners With Vitea To Scale AI Governance Across Its System

Mercyhealth has selected healthcare AI governance company Vitea to oversee artificial intelligence applications across its hospitals and care sites, the organizations announced on August 11.

The Rockford, Illinois-based nonprofit health system will use Vitea’s platform for AI visibility, policy enforcement and monitoring as it expands AI across clinical workflows, patient outcomes and operational functions. Mercyhealth said the partnership is intended to provide centralized oversight of AI applications operating across its system.

Mercyhealth operates seven hospitals and more than 85 primary and specialty care locations across northern Illinois and southern Wisconsin, according to the organization. It also completed an affiliation with FHN at the start of 2026, expanding its footprint in northwest Illinois. 

AI Adoption Raises Governance Requirements

The partnership comes as healthcare providers deploy AI across a wider range of functions. Mercyhealth, for example, launched an Aquablation treatment program in June that uses AI-assisted treatment planning alongside ultrasound imaging, digital cystoscopy and robotic precision.

The system’s Chief Information Officer Ali Olia said traditional security tools were not designed for the behavior of non-deterministic AI systems.

"AI introduces a new category of risk that traditional security tools simply weren't built to address," Olia said. "These are non-deterministic systems—they don't behave the same way twice—and that requires a fundamentally different approach to governance."

The move follows a similar deployment at Hartford HealthCare, which partnered with Vitea in May to monitor AI performance, maintain governance standards and support compliance across its healthcare network.

Healthcare organizations are also navigating evolving requirements around AI transparency and oversight. The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology’s HTI-1 final rule established transparency requirements for AI and other predictive algorithms used in certified health IT.

The regulatory environment varies across healthcare applications. In January, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued final guidance clarifying which clinical decision support software functions may fall outside the definition of a medical device and which remain subject to existing digital health policies.

Mercyhealth Adds Centralized AI Controls

Vitea said its platform provides visibility into AI applications and allows organizations to enforce policies across prompts and responses. The company said the platform includes more than 100 healthcare-specific policies and continuous monitoring capabilities.

Mercyhealth Chief Data and Analytics Officer Jeremy Colson said the system needed visibility into AI performance and the ability to enforce policies across applications.

"With Vitea, we have visibility into how our AI applications are performing and the ability to enforce policy across them, so deviations surface early rather than after the fact," Colson said.

The governance requirement comes as health systems pursue increasingly sophisticated AI applications. Mayo Clinic and Microsoft, for example, announced plans in June to develop a healthcare-specific frontier AI model for clinical reasoning, diagnosis and treatment decisions, with the model initially intended for deployment within Mayo Clinic’s clinical environment.

For Mercyhealth, the Vitea partnership establishes a centralized layer for monitoring and controlling AI as applications expand across its system. The organizations did not disclose financial terms of the agreement.